


from the pitiless wave

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Post-Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-09 08:46:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: The rift's gone. There's no turning back.





	1. is it therefore the less gone?

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. _edited, 21/10/2017_ : written before season 4 aired but technically not retconned! thus, this takes place far, far after season 4. dedicated to my best girl, who nobly ventured from reading straight-up sheith to suffer through whatever the fuck this is, and also to my neighbors, who probably heard all my ecstatic whooping at three in the morning. sorry, neighbors! i was just really excited about not having to rewrite 13k.
> 
> 2\. i feel that some stories work better where you're left to piece things together and the setup isn't fully explained until the end. not everybody agrees. given the discrepancy, i wasn't quite sure how to tag. settle for a warning: if you're super in the mood for canon sheith in the canon 'verse, this may not be for you. to spoil the plot, highlight the following: [ [click if on mobile](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12272952?style=disable#mobile1) ]"shiro" in this fic is actually kuron. this fic pairs him with the keith of an alternate 'bad end' timeline.
> 
> 3\. i do guarantee that the following contains none of the common sexual squicks and i'm happy to tag for any i missed if you run into something for which you'd really like a heads-up. the porn's only in the second half, if that makes a difference to you.

Impact.

Screen after screen burns violet along the console, diagnostic windows snapping open like shutters, _error, error, error_ —

Shiro slams both hands down, braces himself as the grinding crash batters the hull. Metal groans and quakes. Overhead, the autonavigator's sputtering off-key, warping, swinging from its standard murmur to a lead-heavy growl and back again: _hull breach. Power interference detected. Disabling cabin air distribution controls and particulates filtration system. Pilot must engage manual override to proceed—_

He winces through a spurt of red-green sparks, swallows. He's shaking, and the closeness of the cruisers cockpit seems to rattle with him. 

_Focus_. 

He needs to slow down. He can't. There's the shouting of another universe still resounding in his marrows, louder than bombs, than missile launches, than bursting stars: _listen to me, Shiro! There's still time. I know we can work together on this. We'll—we can figure something out. Some way. You can still come out, just open the door—_

Shiro breathes out. "Sorry," he tells the stillness, and smiles.

Pull by pull, he gets to work—mutes the autonav as it reels through every point of new damage, and deactivates the cruiser's shields, ignoring the view looming through the cockpit glass. The rearview cameras crackle, then steady: two screens glinting with drifting shards of a satellite dish, splinters where the hull'd cracked wide, pieces spiraling out to black space in a battered galaxy. The cruiser hadn't struck hard, but these little scout-ships were never built to take the damage that a Lion could. He'll have to get used to that.

After all, the rift's gone. He's alone. There's no turning back.

At the communication module, a warning light flicks awake, spinning silver and red by turns. "No," Shiro mutters, rattling keys, "no, not _yet_ —"

But the interface's flooding with a thousand angles of the same scene. Cannonfire, flaring red and blue. The hull charred, gaping open. Bodies in striped armor and lurid glowing visors, striding up a gangplank. Steel fists pounding the cruiser's command-frozen doors like hail, alien fingers prying them apart.

The cruiser dips in a dizzy sway, rocked by another cannonshot. Shiro jerks back. Pressure's lacing the windshield with cracks, fissures racing out like thirsty roots—and past the glass rises a vast, familiar crescent: an armored frigate-ship, striped with Galra army colors.

A laugh snaps at the backs of his teeth. Of course. There'd been Galra in the universe that he'd left behind—why wouldn't they be conquerors and destroyers here, too? "Depressurize," Shiro manages to tell the autonav. "Empty oxygen reserves. Shut down all life support immediately. I'm overriding the preservation subprocesses—set the self-destruct for fifteen minutes." 

He feeds it the password syllable by syllable as he crams on a battered helmet. Pressure shivers through the gaps, an instant before the suit seals.

The first armored wave's crumpling as he dashes out, choking and slumping along the narrow hall. He spares them no pity—stops only to drag a pulse-blaster from one soldier's slackening hands before he races on.

 _Think ahead. Think like a paladin._ By its size and stripes, the frigate had looked like one of the Empire's foundry ships, used to forge and deliver inventory from sector to sector. That means supplies. It means maps through the sector fit for Galra command, and at least one or two fresh cruisers for scouts.

He's survived worse escapes.

Up he goes, taking the gravitised gangplank in strides through the stretch between cruiser and Galra warship. Whatever command dispatched the regiment to deal with him, they obviously hadn't counted on an immediate offensive. Three blasts, and the path's clear through a grey service corridor.

Shiro keeps running. Alarms blare like homing signals overhead, clusters of them in the cruxes between halls. Guided by their flashing, he clambers up the narrow, twisting steps and into some generic transport chamber—jumps onto the first escalating platform to rise from the floor, and steps off at the first stop into a vast hollow ringed with shadowy pillars. Sound's filtering through the spacesuit: metal, fire, the thunder of a regiment in lockstep. Charmarks lash black along the steel floor. Apparently there'd been a reason the ship had only sent a fistful of guards to handle his crash.

Somewhere close, a battle's already burning.

He means to walk, to hide and steal through to the hangar—but one stride, two, and he's running, pounding down corridors, hurtling headlong through doors blown wide. Hall twists into hall; Shiro chases the distant tidal rumble of fighting, stride after stride until its haze sharpens into sound. Laserfire, steel whining against steel. 

A boy's voice like a struck bell, shouting above the fray.

His fists jolt; his step stammers, boots grating steel fit to drag up sparks.

"Keith," he says.

 _Impossible,_ he knows, but he can't stop, can't slow down. Another turn, and Shiro goes barreling around the next corner and stumbling into an arching chamber.

The floor's a wreck already: littered with fallen guards, alarms spinning and shrilling in clusters, stacked crates quivering where they stand, ash-scarred and splintering. At the heart of the chamber, figures stand back to back in battered armor, two blades raised against an empire.

A laser-shot arcs through the air. The closest figure snaps up an arm. Light races and pools over him, shining like a particle barrier as the laser shatters. His silhouette burns through its pale, filtering haze: cropped dark hair, a fox-thin face, eyes that snap at once to new movement.

Shiro stares.

The shield goes out.

Chaos. A new tide of soldiers goes rushing in, but the floor shakes with a new tumult of explosions as they cross, landmines flaring white in a chain beneath their boots. It doesn't matter. In the crumbling aftermath, Keith's breaking away from the other shadow, veering towards him through the rush with his dark eyes held steady through the smoke. "Shiro," he says. " _Shiro_ —"

Another guard comes charging from a side—Shiro's barely wrenched his mouth open to shout before the red bayard spins to its owner's hand. Keith twists, guts deep, hauls it back from the soldier's sparking wreck. 

Without a word, they turn back to the fight. Back flush against the wall, Shiro drops to a knee; he settles the blaster over a shoulder. Reinforcements pour through the open doors; he snipes each head as it snaps into view while Keith and his shadow bury themselves in the fray. They're clumsy tactics, desperate, the kind that would've never stood a chance on a real battlefield—but they've hit a commandship unused to battle, a storage chamber with only two doors.

The last soldier falls just as the blaster sputters dry in his hands. Across the strewn floor, Keith's eyes lash over his; without skipping a beat, he _slings_ the blade at him in a perfect, gutting arc.

Shiro twists, dropping back against the wall. 

A sword clatters. One step away, the soldier standing over him jerks and trembles in place, bayard driven deep through the slit of its lurid visor. Its light shudders out. The body falls like thunder.

The chamber's almost empty. His hands drag boneless along the floor. Breathe.

 _Shiro,_ this not-stranger had said.

Under the ship's metallic silence, Shiro pushes himself up. "Thanks," he starts—but the second figure's trampling over his voice, racing for the open doors. A green cloak flaring over her sparrow-boned shoulders. Lamplight spills from the hall, violet brimming along her round glasses and her set jaw as she lifts her head.

He says her name, or starts to—but smoke flashes up from the heart of the floor: white then stinking, sulfur-yellow smogging up in wisps.

A hand bands over his arm like iron before it lets go. " _Get moving_ ," Keith bites out. 

They run, alarms snarling white-violet-white down the ship's gaping halls with the reek pouring out behind him. Keith'd taken the lead in the fight, but Pidge carries the directions. Not a word passes between them, only movement and muscle memory: his stride matched to hers, the way she rolls her eyes skyward before she hooks his fingers in her own. Where she tugs, they turn together, hurrying along to some mysterious guidance that might be fate or the green hologram dancing from her wrist-strap.

Hall, chamber, escalator platform. Together, they drop through the ship in a tumult. A Galra voice shatters the lull as they land in a wide, empty corridor, grinding out commands in a dialect too harsh to understand. Through an archway, Shiro glimpses shadowed, curving alcoves and the flare of a scoutship's wing.

The hangar.

They run, but the doors are dragging together, steel grinding like teeth. 

"We're not going to make it if—" Shiro starts, and Pidge jerks. Underneath a cluster of shrilling bulbs, her glasses flare. Lights are spinning out from her wrist strap, laser after laser tangling into holographic panes, into the pixellated, shimmering projection of a lighted keyboard. Its keys flare under her tapping, their rhythm matched to the shrill pulse of the alarms. 

She stops.

Every lamp winks out, then surges back into a dull red glow. The doors shudder and clank into stillness, one inch from locking.

Pidge catches his eye; her mouth snaps into a grin, livid and wide through the haze.

Keith's already at the doors, shoving a shoulder between their steel jaws. Through grim, relentless effort, each side rolls back just enough to squeeze through. The hangar's emptied out, cruisers and scout-ships drowsing in their hollows. Pidge snaps her chin at the flyer sitting at the farthest end: a rust-pocked, frail-winged thing striped with Galra insignias long gone out of style. It looks like it might crawl if they kicked it. Maybe.

His gaze wheels to the bay doors and back. "We need—" 

"A way out," Keith snaps, iron-edged. "We've got it covered."

"Do you? I'm guessing they'll be sending reinforcements any minute."

"Pidge jammed the elevators. That buys us seven more minutes. The bay doors'll be open in three. But that's not your problem. Whoever you are, you've got one minute to get in the flyer."

Silence pools between them, stillwater in his lungs. "Whoever I am."

Keith's teeth grit sharp enough to spit sparks; in the lurid dark, his eyes catch like stars. "I know you're not him," he says.

A slam cracks through the hangar: Pidge's fist pounding the cruiser's unlocked shell to _get moving_.

One after another, they clamber over its rust-crabbed wings, ignoring the shimmer over its flaking paint to pile into the two-seat cockpit. Beneath the glass, the navigational console arches out into a pearled webbing, nothing like Galra tech. Outside, the bay doors are easing down, air rushing into a roar; beneath the tidal pull of space sways thin, glowering shouts. _Galra_.

Keith lifts his head. "Disable cloaking, initiate launch protocols," he says, and every screen flares as Pidge smears her open hand against a palm reader.

Light shatters the alcove.

The disguising hologram shivers, pixels peeling off in rays and stripes. Its shape comes bursting through the dim projection: a ship with arched wings and a curving snout yellow as a bumblebee's belly. Shiro drops himself behind the two pilot's seats; Keith's already slouched over the console, tugging creaky levers and cursing the engine. Holoconsoles reel around Pidge's seat: shields, maintenance monitors, and a scattering of surveillance and radar feeds. The cockpit glows with all the standard flight controls—but there's no navigational chart in sight. 

"Where're you _going_?"

He has to shout. The turbines are surging, crackling fit to override any voice; the hangar doors have wound open to black space. The flyer churns, wheeling out from its alcove; still, Keith fires a glare over his shoulder, dark-eyed focus.

"Just hold on," he bites out, and Shiro tightens his grip.

****

# *

****

Hours swarm by in constellations.

They swoop through empty stretches littered with dust and debris, fields crackling with spy-flyers and surveilling radar, sectors whose stars prickle constellations at the back of memory. In a two-seat flyer, Shiro digs out his own little space: he slouches against the back of Keith's seat, knees up, boot crammed against the backwall as his fists brace for turbulence. The corner reeks like sweat and notes of green tea.

But the radar's blip rings steady through a flight suspended in the silence of endless stars.

He's half-drowsing by the time they drop from traveling speed into orbit mode. The seat jolts back; he jerks awake into a shadow and a dark-eyed stare. "Move," Keith says.

Shiro glances around him: wall, chair, armored body with folded arms. His head thuds back against the seat; his mouth quirks. "Not a lot of space back here."

Reflex snarls. Keith snaps a hand over his wrist—in the same instant, Shiro's grip tightens over his knuckles, metal grinding bone.

_I know you're not him._

He'd moved without thinking. He can't do that anymore. With care, Shiro bows his head; his thumb skims over Keith's knuckles, gentle and easy. "Sorry," he says, and tastes the exhaust of another universe on his tongue like the echo of a kiss. "I'll get out of your way. Can you pull me up?"

He clambers to his feet with his fingers loose as rope in Keith's—shuffles himself behind the other seat as Pidge comes eeling into the cramped gap, too. Without a glance to spare, Keith's prying a panel loose from the floor, baring the ship's guts in a tangle of wires and pipes. Pidge crowds past him and hops down, settles into her glittering electric nest, sure as a fledgling.

Stranded outside their haze of muttering and clanks, Shiro stares through the windshield. Pidge cleared the nav-screens; the ship's coasting through lazy orbit, headlights blinking an unfamiliar signal, steady as a beacon. But the waiting ship's still violet and striped—bigger, wide and solemn-bellied as a whale in her drift, but no less active or _Galra_.

He clears his throat and turns. "Guys—"

A little _bang_ shocks through the ship; Pidge's skinny wrists bolt from the compartment, clutching a smoking glass ball between two thick gloves. 

The ball jumps into the air. Instinct drags Shiro forward to snag it as Pidge hefts herself up from the compartment. By the time he's reeled back, the windshield's flooded with new feeds again: window after window of tiny font, a lock-screen reeling with alien letters in a shining hail, all of which shivers and folds as Pidge batters across the keys.

 _Contractor signal recognised,_ the autonav says in a nervous rolling tenor, nearly familiar. Another projection melts away as their ship closes in, scoutship withering into the chipped, blocky clumping of a cargo-runner, black and white and orange as rust, its hangar's jaws already stretching greedy and wide in wait.

Keith docks the ship on its charging station with barely a shudder, his pilot's hands firm and faultless. He braces them along the wheel as the hangar doors churn together outside, grating and grinding through their rust. A new scar's stitched silver down the slope from little finger to wrist.

The console winks out. At once, Pidge crushes her face into the dashboard.

"Pidge," Shiro says. He glances at Keith, who narrows his eyes. 

"Are you really sleeping in here? Again?"

In answer, Pidge's chin digs into the ghosts of fading keys, crushing out a few fading chimes as the system shuts down. Her cheek thunks against the dashboard again, turned away.

"Fine." The hood hisses open as Keith pushes to his feet. His gaze flicks to Shiro, then away again. "Come on."

"Is she tired? It was a pretty long ride. I could," Shiro tells her wrists as they knot over her tufting head, "just carry you out—"

"She's twenty. You don't have to baby her. "

Shiro glances from prodigy to prodigy. His mouth quirks a little. "And—how old are you?"

Keith stares back. "I meant," he says, "she'll get up when she feels like getting up. She doesn't like people touching her."

He turns, sharp on his heel; Shiro rolls his jaw once and lets the silence churn on. They climb out without another word. 

It isn't the castle. Nothing in the hold looks Altean: its low ceiling, its walls slouching under their own raggedy rust, stretches of tin battered on a cheap anvil long ago, too tired for grace. Over years, some stubborn hand's welded its repairs from junkyards and pawnshop parts. The hand hadn't stretched as far as sweeping: from the ship to each of the three bay doors, the floor's crowded with crates and cardboard, all the greying scattered shrapnel of old cargo.

"Now _that's_ a new face."

Across the hangar, by a crooked stack of crates, an alien's tapping a pointed boot against the floor, a slim gold figurine shining amid cheap metal. Her eyes light, warming; her lips curve with a slim, glossy smile.

"Don't," Keith says.

The stranger clasps the flats of her wrists over her mouth. Her fingers flutter thick as claws. "Aw, Keith, don't be grumpy. If you wanted a _welcome back_ , you could've said so. Do you want to rewind? You oomuns, so sensitive about your timestream—"

Memory filters as if through netting. He knows the cut of those flat, winged tendrils swaying from her head, those inky eyes, the singing silk of her tone. 

"You're—" Shiro says. An old name crackles into static on his tongue, and bursts. " _Nyma._ Is Rolo with you?"

"Have we met?" Nyma taps a padded finger to her pursing mouth; her tendrils sway as her gaze flicks over him, shoulders to hips. "You are _pretty_ cute for one more of their kind. If Keith's going to try to skip paying for your fare again, I guess we can think of a _few_ ways for you to earn passage, wherever you're going."

"We're not paying for him."

"Oh, Keith." She sighs, all gust and sugar. "You're very cute, and you do a good job. But let's face it—Pidge's security system on your room crashes way too often for you to be secure in making demands. You still don't have our shiplock codes, and we _do_ know where you sleep at night."

But Keith's barreling forward as she talks, moving in lockstep to her gauzy lilt. He stops inches before her; their shadows hold black beneath the fluorescent lights, unfaltering. "We're not paying," he says, low and carrying, "because you still need someone to take the heat for you when you break into those bankspires on Mhiere. The second you dump Pidge and me anywhere, every minister in the Coalition's going to get the call with your license number. They're probably still looking for whoever pawned that shipment of expired gheri minerals at the last Coalition market."

"Hmmm." Nyma locks her limbs behind her back, swaying in place with a daisy's charm. "It's early, you know. I still have a _few_ people I could call about the bankspires..."

"You have a fence lined up for the next job. You need someone you know can handle it. Save the posing for someone who _likes_ watching you waste their time."

It's a voice with flint in its bones: the kind of edged, brittle talk that Shiro used to hear crackling in the cadet barracks after dark, seconds before fists came whistling through. But Nyma only sighs in a long flutter, all lashes and limbs. "All _right_. You usually come back in a way better mood after a raid. I'll tell Rolo we're up to renegotiate after the next job. But you'd better hope that next paycheck comes through for us."

The door grinds open to her step; humming with its groan, Nyma minces out to a cramped, coppery corridor. 

Nature, Shiro knows, abhors a vacuum. She'd crowded out silence and thought with her glassy, jibing conversation; now, with her absence, all the unconsidered signs come tiding back. _The next job_. The shining strap on Pidge's wrist, and the little tricks and explosions that they'd blown through the Galra warship's halls. Nyma and Rolo, joint owners of a cargohold still littered with old products, bare of any sign of _Voltron_.

"Are you," Shiro says, but the frame's dishonest. He knows his own answer. "You're thieves."

Too late, the ring of it carries to his own ear: judgment, clotting thick. Keith snaps him a glare, seething and restless. "I have to go talk to the rest of the crew," he says. He points to a side-door, cutting away Shiro's protest. "Our room's down there. First one on the left. If you see anyone, don't talk to them."

He's already turned away; his shoulders stiffen once, then set in lines like lead. The distance's gaping between them already, long enough to swallow a lion's shadow. The floor holds steady beneath him, but still his whole frame's singing with a sense of _impact_ , a physical blow, shrapnel from the moment that his cruiser'd broken against a Galra warship.

 _Steady._ He counts it off in his head, one, two, three—but his body's already in motion, crossing the hangar in strides. Keith whirls as Shiro's grip closes metal over his wrist.

Heartbeats ride over the silence's dizzying edge. He can't keep staring, but there's no words beneath his ribs left to give. "You don't have to keep me," Shiro says at last, the shadow of an echo, "if I'm too much trouble right now."

One heartbeat. Two.

The arm in his grip wrenches up; a fist snags in his jacket, seizing tight. Metal rattles; steel blares cold down his back as Keith braces him against the wall. "Guess I wasn't clear enough," Keith says, and there's nothing of the light he knows in those dark eyes. "Don't try to sound like someone you're not. Don't tell me what I'm going to do. Until we get some answers about how you got here, you don't get to do _anything_. If you understand what I'm saying to you, say _yes, sir._ "

Reflex churns his skull like ditchwater. Every wire and fiber in him knows the next move, aches for it: char and rend and tear. His pulse thunders. His arm flexes with force and alien steel.

 _—listen to me. You're not just another sacrifice—you've never been_ just _anything. You came through for me, Shiro, the same way you always have. It's who you are. Can you just believe me, why can't you—_

But that was in another universe, Shiro remembers; and besides, the man is dead.

"Yes, sir," he grates.

Keith drops back. His hand falls, and knuckles white. In silence he twists away—barrels through the door without a backward glance.

****

# *

****

_First one on the left_ turns out to be a better instruction than Keith usually gives. The smallest door opens into another spidery passage, tended by a flickering bulb. The room's worse: a rust-scraped bunker webbed with a cat's cradle of wire and clotheslines. Blankets have been thrown over each rope, pinned down into a city of tents. Pillows clump underfoot, hiding wires and old takeout bags still shiny with grease. Here and there, monitor light hollows a few tents; these glow like pearl through the maze of grey sheets, their worktables and lamps reframed into bony silhouettes.

Shiro ducks through. The first tent's overflowing with baskets piled high: leather jackets and glassy frills, reeking with the must of well-aged sweat when Shiro flicks a flap. His lungs clutch and strain, and he goes stumbling for the next tent.

As he crosses the threshold, a harp's note plucks the air.

Light snaps in every direction. A narrow scalding bar flares past his hip, his shoulder, just behind the jerk of a knee. A web of light's sprung up around him, heat thrumming from every string. At the tent's far end, he watches a little screen on a podium crackle awake: its keypad gleams as if in open malice.

"Honestly," Shiro tells the lasers, "I should have seen this coming."

It takes him two minutes to sink into a safe half-crouch, to anchor a hand behind himself, and start to work one leg loose from the tangle of lasers. He's bent back most of one thigh by the time the door creaks behind him and some thudding intruder clanks through the door and comes barreling in. 

A warning crackles in his lungs, but Pidge's already winged by. A hand lifts, snaps open her cloak's hook, clicks at one jeweled earring as she passes. The cloak spills off her shoulders and goes fluttering; in its shadow, every laser veers away and sputters out. 

Shiro drops into a heap.

"Good timing," he says, muffled, nose crushing into steel and an old teabag.

Moon-eyed, Pidge ignores him to plant herself in a settled nest of blankets by the podium. A projector sinks from the ceiling; its needling laser fires over her head, glances off a curving glass, and splits into a reel of feather-faint projection screens around her. Her thin hands pluck and prickle at their keys, spinning ghostly patterns through thin air.

 _Twenty years old_ , Keith had said. Five years since the Garrison faded into a photograph-print memory, a brick-and-mortar tempest in a desert far, far away. In the warship, he'd known her by her stride, her tufting hair and relentless efficiency. But even thin light reveals the differences: four years have thinned her from a sparrow to a hummingbird, ballpoint bones stark beneath her owlish lenses. 

"Hey," Shiro says. "If I startled you back there, on the ship—I'm sorry."

Her typing stills. Through the glass, Pidge's hollow-heavy eyes flick back. A laser's hazy light loops through the lenses, and then the moment's lost. The rhythm of the keys picks up as if it'd never faltered.

He waits. "Are you—"

"Leave her alone."

Keith comes pushing through, carrying another clumping armful of blankets. He crosses the floor, wafting lavender, and drops one on Pidge's head. The screens flicker, and she snaps up a lasering glare—but Keith only folds his arms. "Are you really just going to let him stay in here?"

Her mouth juts, then pinches; she crams the blanket into her lap, twitches her shoulders with a shrug.

"I'm not a threat to you," Shiro says. " _Either_ of you."

Keith's shoulders flatline, and the set of his jaw's easier still to read. He shifts his weight, heel to heel, and crosses the floor to stand between them. "Yeah. You'd have to say that. But the tech on your shoulder's still active."

Shiro stares. "Could the Galra track—"

"I talked to the mechs," Keith says, and Pidge jabs sparks from a screen, offended. "Even if that thing's sending out any kind of signal, the standard Galra frequencies wouldn't detect it. But that doesn't mean you're clear."

Adrenaline wells and withers again, clotting ash in Shiro's throat. He swallows. His palm smoothes the floor; he braces his weight onto one wrist, then the other as he pushes himself to his feet, every movement mercury-slow and easy to track. "I can explain," Shiro says, "Keith, if you'll just—"

But the line snaps out of his teeth.

Steel prickles skin. The air between them shudders and trembles. Their gazes catch over the red bayard's edge.

" _Don't_ ," Keith says, but the word comes apart on his tongue, crumbles to shrapnel and steam. His fingers tighten, shivering the blade as Shiro holds still. "I don't know where you got that name or that _face_ , but you're not him. Do you think we don't know about shapeshifters by now?"

"It'd be a pretty dangerous move," Shiro says, "bringing a shapeshifter onto a ship full of people."

"I wasn't thinking," Keith bites out, and a fist jumps at his thigh, electric. "I can't—if you want to talk, start with why you look like _that_."

The years that laid siege to Pidge haven't spared Keith, either. Even through the tent's dim glow, he's a ragged figure: unkempt and dressed in raggedy pickings from an alien market; corded with new muscle, shoulders to thighs, but his veins a stark green tracery over his wrists; an ashy, tight-stitched frown like a man biting down some fear worse than starving.

"I may not be the one you remember," Shiro says—and he takes it slow this time. He won't get another chance. "But I promise that I'm not a shapeshifter, or some kind of traitor. I've always looked like this. My name is Takashi Shirogane. I was a pilot for the Galaxy Garrison on the first Kerberos mission. I can't tell you my cadet number anymore—but if there's anything else that you want to know, I'll be happy to answer your questions."

"If _Voltron_ ," he adds, tentative, "means anything to you, then you must know about the lions. I used to be the Black Lion's pilot."

It's the wrong cue, or the one he should have offered from the start. Pidge's fists drop to her knees like anchors; Keith snaps a glare back, fierce-eyed and searching. They move like cogs grinding, like lines of the same code sequence, two pulses riding the same wavelength. "The _Black_ Lion," he says. "That doesn't make any sense."

"You've heard of it," Shiro says, and the rest of the thought runs blank. "What happened to it here?"

"The Black Lion's gone. It's been gone for years. We destroyed it." The bayard doesn't twitch. "Still sure your explanation's going to hold up?"

"I—"

But Keith breaks off into a gritty wince—Pidge's leaned over to kick him in the shin. "What?" he demand; she shrugs. "I wasn't—all right, _fine_." His hand drops, blade swaying. Without another word, he stalks over to Pidge's nest, drops into a cross-legged hunch to wait. 

Shiro waits, too. Screen after screen whirls over her tufted head and vanishes into thin air. In the end, only one projection lingers: a grim, bucktoothed skull which drifts, pulsing through the air, before a red circle swipes around it, cages it behind a red bar.

"You spent way too much time making that," Keith mutters, and then, "Fine, I know, you don't have to _kick_ me again."

"I'm guessing," Shiro says as Pidge rolls her shoulders in serene triumph, "that wasn't an emergency."

Keith's gaze settles on him as if he'd forgotten that Shiro was still there, a glassy blankness belied by the current churning his spine into an anchor's chain. "As long as you're here," he says, "if you decide that there's something important you want to tell us, tell Pidge first. She'll make it safe."

That needs no explanation—he'd seen Nyma's bright, caressing curiosity in the hold. She'd come to them without knives in her hands, but _let's face it—Pidge's security system on your room crashes way too often for you to be secure in making demands._

He smoothes a palm from brow to jaw. "I thought they were your allies," Shiro says.

"They hired us," Keith says. "It's a job. Your turn."

It's not much of an answer—but then, Keith never has been.

Shiro exhales, steadying. Pidge's called up new screens already; he watches galaxies spiral through her projections like smoke. "On our way out, you saw a cruiser outside the flagship," he says. "Let's start with that. How much do you know about the rifts?"

****

# *

****

"So Zarkon kept the Red Lion," he says, slow. "That's impossible."

Keith snorts. Over the conversation's winding course, blanket after blanket's been drawn across the room, heaping Pidge's nest into a cocoon; he slouches back against it like a wolf raising hackles at the mouth of its den. "That's kind of ironic, coming from the guy who wants us to buy into _alternate universes_."

"It's the truth, Keith."

"Tell me the story again."

 _Third time_ , he thinks of saying—but in Keith's place, he'd push for this endless cycling and recycling of answers, too. This isn't an interrogation, which means that Keith has no baseline to measure out his trust. The only way to be sure of an unbelievable story's to go over its facts, line by line, grinding clarity out of its alien dust. "Ten thousand years ago," Shiro says again, "Alfor built Voltron out of—"

"You can skip the prologue," Keith says. His brows jut black through the wintry simulation lights. "We get it. Lotor figured out that the stuff that made Voltron could also cross between dimensions at specific points. He was using Haggar's intel from centuries of research to manipulate the rifts and for something specific in another dimension. You knew that the only way to stop him was to take his ship into another dimension. You worked with Voltron to steal the ship, brought it out here, and they closed the rift behind you."

In Keith's mouth, the echo turns savage, crackling staccato, a low new voice casting back to lost days in Garrison hallways and simulation chambers. It'd be funny if only he could look away. "That's about it."

"Liar."

He laughs. He can't help it: the sound shocks out through his lungs. If there were any proof that this was a separate universe, this must be it. "You think I'd lie to you?"

Silence runs between them like glass. "You said you were part of Voltron," Keith says. "That we _both_ were. If I was a paladin of Voltron—I think I'd know a lot better than to let the head of the one thing that could destroy the Galra Empire run off into another dimension."

The tent's shadows curl too close; a single breath out of place could sweep the room like a storm. The Black Lion's absence hums in his bones, an impossible ghost. "It was a chance worth taking."

He lifts his head. Their gazes strike.

"How else," Shiro says, with terrible gentleness, "would I be standing here?"

Keith flinches, the kind of spark that rattles down to bone. His fists thud against the floor; his head wrenches down.

"Keith—"

"You can stay with us for now," Keith says, in a low, ashen voice. He hunches in place, arms crossed and his steady voice like cracked coal. "The next job won't be for another couple weeks. Once that's over, Rolo and Nyma'll head out to one of the Coalition hub-markets. We can drop you off there. You can find a ride to wherever you want to go after that."

The burn of his last laugh roils at the backs of his teeth, acid. He'd promised to leave—he'd offered first. It doesn't soften the irony: taking the brunt of Keith's guarded, iron-edged temper, here and now, with an echo still coiling in his veins.

Maybe it's spite. An ache and a memory of warmth. The lag of another universe still rooted in his marrows. The utter unbreachable rise of Keith's steel-eyed guard and everything it means. "You've brought up the next job a couple times now," Shiro finds himself saying. "If you need help—I'd like to do what I can."

"Shouldn't you be more worried about getting the rift back open?"

 _Don't, Shiro,_ he'd said past the airlock. _You don't have to do this._

"When we were deciding what to do with the cruiser," Shiro says, "we all understood that whoever decided to fly it—there'd be no coming back. The rift closed. And I'm not going to risk giving Lotor what he wants by trying to find another way back."

"You're still not staying with us."

Keith's lifted his chin, shoulders bolted tight, all raw, gutting defenses in the screen's filtering light: a soldier taking a stand on a history that Shiro could've never dreamed. He takes his time working through the thought, chafing at a wrist. "As soon as I got here, you said my name. Were we—enemies?"

" _Shut up_."

Stroke by stroke, Pidge's screens are steadying, their lights churning the tent to silhouettes and glassy lines. Keith's staring through their waves, fierce-eyed even when he's caught off-guard, relentless like he's never learned how to stop. The one thing that Shiro's still good for, it seems, is hurting him.

"So that's not it," Shiro says, quieter. "Then why?"

A shapeless breath wrenches in Keith's throat, rattles his teeth before he swallows it down again. "This isn't your fight," he says—but the rest jars out of him as every screen plunges black.

White lashes across the farthest sheet, a wire of light strung from the mouth of Pidge's projector. In instants, it's spilled across the cloth, reeling and winking and racing in every direction to sketch the clean, rounded stones of a tower, a parapet, a bare and shining wall.

Slowly, Shiro says, "Are those floor plans?"

Keith pushes himself up—knots a fist along the soft, raggedy rim of Pidge's nest and pulls. She flicks her glassy gaze up from the screen to meet him, a wordless answer, savage indifference.

"Fine," Keith says at last, in a voice scraped down to rust. He rises, crosses the little distance to tap the lowest line of the diagram. At once the map remakes itself: new towers surge from the grid, lines spidering out through thin air into concrete rises and crenellations and narrow, pearl-lined streets. "This is the market sector in Mhiere—the next planet we're going to. The tower's magnitech: it belongs to the city shipment receiver. Mhiere uses it to launch time capsules and stuff that's being disputed into the ring around the planet. Most of the pods are just... filled with old junk."

"Junk."

Keith glowers. "Things with _historical value_ ," he says. "Whatever. The point is, they aren't exactly something we can sell at the kind of markets we dock at. The guy who runs the tower's supposed to do what the city needs—he beams stuff down from storage and sends things up whenever he gets the order. But the Galra have been after the tech for a long time. They know they can't just storm the planet—if they do, Mhiere's told them that they'll bomb the tower just to keep it out of enemy hands. It'd cut them off from a lot of their history, so no one's tried it yet. Lotor's been getting chancellors from planets under Galra rule to work with the guy running the tower. 

"That's where New Taea-Galax comes in. The planet's one of the Empire's biggest assets. For the last couple weeks, the whole sector's been talking about the reward that someone's been offering for one specific pod from the ring. Everybody knows the money's coming from the Chancellor of New Taea-Galax. So the guy at the tower made some kind of deal with the Chancellor. In two weeks, he's going to use the tower to bring down some artifact from the ring and hand it over.

He stops. Shiro says, "Is that what you're hoping to steal?"

"We don't even know what's _inside_ the pod. And if the target was that easy, we'd never get paid." Trust Keith to call a heist from the ring of a planet under imperial attention _easy_ —but he isn't slowing down. "Mhiere's still under development. A lot of the big intergalactic corporations and banks opened new branches in the capital in the last couple centuries. Right now, they're trying to figure out which side to take when the biggest shipment handler on the planet's fighting with the government. Rolo and Nyma want to hit the banks and steal as much as they can. We're here," Keith says, "to distract the police, the army—everything they've got down there. A threat to the planet's ring is a national emergency. The longer we can lock local forces down at the tower, the more Nyma'll be able to get."

"You're not making sense," Shiro says, and Keith stills. "If your background's right, you'll have more than one set of forces to worry about on the ground. But your whole plan comes down to brute force and improvising."

"Because it _works_."

"Does it?" Shiro flexes finger by finger, counts his words with each curl. A parallel universe doesn't mean a perfect mirror. He doesn't have any chances left. "How many times have you pulled off something on this scale, Keith? All the local armed forces and whatever private off-planet guards the local rulers can draft in a day—that could be more dangerous than a Galra warship."

"That's not your problem. I don't remember saying we'd take you on-site."

"If you're going to brute-force your way out, you'll need as many people as you can get." Increase the applied force, spread out the impact—but that's a pre-Newtonian joke anyway. Steadier, Shiro says, "And I'm guessing you don't have the other lions anymore."

A question can bruise in secret places that a fist never would. Keith's mouth drags thin; his eyes widen in their hollows, two stark and guttering lights. "They were there," he says. "Lance. Hunk. They were in Voltron with you, too."

Memory thrums in his bones. The way they'd laughed, straining sound out of themselves by lungfuls when they came stumbling back from missions, ringing down through castle halls. The weight of a glassy shield on his arm as space pollen sailed over his head in powdery fists. Meat, cheese, and the crisp blue sprigs that they'd swiped from an open market during their last day off: _all right. I'll call it. You've officially perfected the space taco._ How the lions had roared over crooked islands and continents, thundering through light-stricken days on alien worlds.

Their conversations keep reshaping themselves, each little silence coming like a new siege, their boundaries dissolved and redrawn by the undertow of a history he doesn't recognise. _Do you want me here?_ he'd meant to ask—but they aren't talking about that now. "I didn't mean to bring up—memories," Shiro says, and leaves their ghosts to lie. "It's like I said: I just want to help."

"If the rumors are right about the deal, the Chancellor wants a specific pod—one of the asteroid belt leftovers that's been in orbit around Mhiere for centuries. It's supposed to have the genetic material for all the major species that went extinct after their last invasion."

"It's the kind of mission that Voltron would've taken," Shiro says, and Keith's gaze flashes up.

"Yeah," he says. "Stuff on the planet's not stable yet. And if the rumors're right, the Chancellor doesn't care about what they put inside the asteroid—just that she gets it. As soon as it hits the atmosphere, everything inside it's going to fry."

But a string of sour, mechanical notes shrills through the air; the tower spills apart and snakes into a larger map, constellations speckling the sheet's hollow shadow. At the map's heart beats a single planet, bright as a candleflame's heart.

Shiro looks over a shoulder; Pidge stares back unblinking, earnest as a stuffed owl.

Keith folds his arms. " _Pidge_ thinks it's not about getting the pod—it's about taking it away. So far this sector's made a few deals with the Empire without getting pulled into the war. They've been a lot more interested in the other fronts."

"But if a Galra ally took a planetary relic away from them, they'd have every reason to join in."

"It doesn't make _sense_. Lotor might not always take the fast way, but he doesn't hold back when it comes to just attacking."

"Lotor," Shiro says, and the rest of it empties out beneath his echo. _The Chancellor doesn't care about what they put inside the asteroid_. He knows this story; he's already lived it once. "You said they made the pod from some kind of space ore—"

Keith's glare snaps up, struck by the same lightning thought. "You think it's the same kind that they used for your ship?"

"I can't be sure," Shiro says, and he's on his feet, pacing as the diagram tangles him in light, shoulders to wrists. "But it'd be another reason why the Galra sent a third-party to do the negotiations. Using the empire's resources would show a lot of people that the asteroid's more important than it seems. And whatever Lotor needs it for—"

"We have to make sure he doesn't get that far," Keith says. "I know." 

The _we_ takes him before the rest of it does: the way Pidge prickles up at her pixel-lit station, chin tilting against her knees. In silence, she takes the brunt of Keith's backward glance, holds it with her lenses burning like red stars, no word or space needed between them.

Netted in a silvery wash of stars, Shiro bows his head.

****

# *

****

Time's a hard thing to hold in his head without some constant star dragging time up from its horizon. They sleep and rise and eat, picking at maps and rumors like sulky ravens. After their fifth round of arguing over flash-thawed takeout, Pidge slaps together a gangling projector, which veils the bunker's farthest wall with a ghostly map of Mhiere's capitol. Hunched and scowling, she leaves them outside the city of tents to quarrel over the logistics of how to hold an alien spire.

This, Shiro reflects, might have looked more impressive if she hadn't wrapped herself in three patchwork blankets for the short walk.

One week winds into the next. No new rumors filter out to them through the flight, neither by the standardized sector channels nor the market gossip that Rolo picks up on refueling days. In the end, their ship docks at Mhiere's shuttle station with barely fistfuls of new data to show for the wait: floorplans for five floors in the spire and a pamphlet which unfolds into the capitol's monthly calendar of public events. 

Through the shuttle window, the capitol fans out in a sleek, sculpted cityscape: mazy with pink and gold stucco, its houses crammed shoulder to shoulder on either side of spindling black bridges; shop-signs swaying along the arching streets like flags. The shipment spire's a needle grinding up through the eye of a sprawling bright complex, pushing skywards with a naked ambition that makes him ache for Earth. The stones of its foundation have been strung and sealed into place by delicate, caging wire, gold embroidering ivory. Sanded boulders whirl through an idle orbit around three levels in the tower, shadows circling over the parched earth in an impossible, relentless wheel. 

"Don't overthink it," Keith says, when Shiro asks. "Some aliens just want to show off."

Shiro gets the standard gear: a keycard to bypass basic security protocols, a laser-pistol with a sticking safety, two nutribars from Pidge. A cloak, too—grey to Pidge's green and Keith's rough scrubbed black, thick enough to hide the blocky lines of their propulsion packs. He takes his time with the buckle, nervous of the cheap metal; after he's done, Keith hooks his fingers along its latch and tugs, to show that it holds.

They pick their way up to the eighth-highest floor as dusk rakes along the coalbed horizon, propelling from ledge to ledge in a shadowy criss-crossing. Spire security sinks a few levels during the evenings, the reports said: automatons shut down as supervisors and guards alike trickle home. The seventy-eighth floor control panel's closest to the porthole—it takes Pidge seven minutes on a wind-whittled ledge to scratch acid across its glass, to push her way through and dash across the walkway to the alarm terminal.

The loading dock's been webbed with platforms and spidering walkways like dinner plates strung by wire. Copper rafters lash over their heads into the unfathomable shadow of the launch dome. A window stretches along the crescent of the tower's white waiting platform; city lights pour through its faceted curve, bursting into spangles as their little hazy beams stream through every pane. Night's stopped the main conveyor belt where it stripes and rolls along the far wall, its steel tongue run mute. Only the central platform churns on in ceaseless circles through the dappling dark; a glassy pyramid juts at its heart, shining cubes stacked one on top of the other, each nearly twice as tall as Shiro himself.

Its bridges have folded back for the night, but that's not a real obstacle. Keith jumps, and Shiro follows.

In their separate corners, they get to work. Keith circles the platform in strides, setting down little black boxes while Shiro sights and shoots each camera in range; each shattering rings through the hollows like hail. "Pidge," Keith calls. At the terminal, Pidge ruffles the spill of her cloak over a shoulder. "You got it?"

Her head flicks down. A glossy, pixellated countdown spills across the observation deck's curving glass, prickling and flashing in red sequins. _5:00,_ it starts: Shiro watches its numbers shiver, racing heartbeats, splitting the stitches where night's sewn along the horizon.

"They won't cut down the platform," he says. "You're sure about that."

Keith sprawls against the pillar, heels kicked apart. The red bayard sways from the tips of his fingers, a tame crescent slice. This won't be close-range combat—but muscle memory's always last to die. "These're the safety deposit boxes for everything they're going to ship tomorrow. They're supposed to be proofed against most of the standard hacks and damages, and they're polarised, so we can't take them off the floor. But a lot of the stuff they're shipping hasn't been strapped down inside the compartments. If we go down, everything crashes with us. The tower's not going to risk damaging their inventory if they don't have to. What?"

He's smiling, is what: his mouth's crooked up at the edges, snagged on some hazy, warming thought that refuses to take real shape. He smoothes one hand over a soft and glassy laugh. "Nothing," Shiro says. "You know your stuff."

"You looked at all the reports with me. The information was right there."

But that's not the point. It'd been a trial in the castle just to get Keith to look at their navigational charts; he'd remembered each star by its mass and color index, then the Altean and generic designation, and let facts about the populations in each system slip through his memory. Even under the crystal screens of the star-watching bay, he'd only stood like a clockwork soldier, his eyes flickering with faraway constellations as he waited and listened and tensed under each new judgment, unfaltering.

His fist curls, knuckling steel. "Still," Shiro says. "Feels like kind of a risk."

"Right. I forgot. You don't take risks."

A moment; a thought. He cocks his head, matching the tilt of Keith's unfamiliar mouth. "Was that a joke?"

Keith twitches a shoulder, easy as Pidge in the things he chooses to shut out. Even apart, they keep mirroring each other at odd angles: her contempt in his sweeping gaze, assessing, and the lift of his chin. "As long as they think we might take the platform down, they're not going to bring in anything bigger than we can handle. You can relax. Just make sure nothing hits this platform. Okay?"

Judgment: _you're being selfish, Keith. You can't be so reckless when you have a team to look out for—_ but those were a dead man's words, a world long gone.

With care, he depresses the blaster's power, waits until its gauge drains and darkens, and runs the cursory check: firing pin, extractor, slide stop lever, trigger. "You don't have to reassure me," Shiro says, soft beneath the clicking sequence. "I've seen what you can do."

In the silence, he glances up: Keith's still looking at him, a dark-eyed, branding look raw as furnace-light. 

They wait: turn after grinding turn, night rusting away the platform's pale borders. A signal shrills through the space; _0:21_ flashes from red to sunlaid gold. The blaster's purring into palm and steel, warmer than a bayard, gauge glinting like an animal's eye. "All right," Shiro says. "You're all set over here."

Whatever tension drives Keith, it isn't entirely bound up in Shiro; he rolls his shoulders once, braces himself to swing a look through the cataractic glow of city lights through the observatory deck's glass. Focus brims in his starstruck eyes, his jaw, the knot of his fingers along the bayard. Touching him now would be a sacrilege, fit to scald a human hand or dent a steel one. He smiles like something born for war."You wanna do the honors?"

He swallows; his throat flexes as if against sand, scraping up dust and silence. Shiro sights the glass, scanning: Pidge's countdown projection, the world outside brimming into a light-storm, the point where light flecks and freckles in a ghostly scar. _Two, one—_

He fires.

Sheer sound rolls through the dome, and roars. Alarms swell in whirling rounds, savage as a storm-tide where they lash through the floors. The platform's shaking, boxes rattling together in scratches and chimes as Shiro braces onto his knees—but Keith's already slammed the control panel. At once, each black box shoots into the air, arcing lights overhead. A shining bubble cascades over the platform; its brightness locks, and all sound drops out.

Up on the rafters, another particle shield races open too: green lace to their shining glass.

Their answer comes in pieces: a single flyer drifting outside the jagged teeth of the shattered window, then another, a third, figures clinging to the bars beneath each whirling rotor-wing, black suits and visored helmets, carrying striped, gaudy megaphones and bawling the same chorus of promises. They keep their heads down, keep waiting—wait until the boxes are trembling along the platform, feverish above the platform's grinding turn.

Keith jerks his head, and Shiro nods.

The shield goes out.

At once, a capsule swings down from empty air—Shiro whirls, locks the blaster's incineration mode and snaps off a round. The shot goes tumbling, clanks from platform to platform, bursts with a flare levels down.

The projection's blasted out, but the countdown ticks on. Little sniping exchanges surge into a siege. Soldiers line up their blasters, rattling hails of laserfire along the borders of the platform; snipers string themselves from the rafters, or come coiling up from the depths of the tower in a snaking line, snapping off shot after shot. A twig-legged figure comes tottering to the front, bowed beneath the weight of a gleaming shoulder-cannon. Its shot rings out; through its trailing smoke, Shiro spots some green-clawed thing in a pale tabard climbing up to Pidge's rafter. 

Reflex.

He lines up and _fires_ , sees the faraway shadow writhe and tumble—lifts his head as the cannon's missile drops towards him—

 _Clang_.

Steel clangs off bayard steel. The missile spins off to a tumult of diving soldiers, its clattering roll nearly lost beneath the shock of a curse through Keith's teeth. " _Raise shields!_ " he snarls, and silver spins its curtain around the platform, shuddering just in time beneath a fresh surge of shots. "What were you doing?"

Shiro jerks up. Adrenaline's still singing in his ears; his whole body's strung up as if by electrified wires. "One of them was headed after Pidge—"

"Pidge came out with five fail-safes. So far, she hasn't even broken two. She's fine. I told you to keep your eyes on what's trying to hit us down here."

"Sorry," Shiro grates. "Guess I'm used to _teamwork_ meaning something a little different." 

Keith drops to his knees. A hand clamps his shoulder, vising tight; a dark head thuds against his. "Save the fight for later," Keith says through the dull ring in his ears. " _Listen_ to me. You said you wanted to help, so we brought you with us. If you can't handle that, I'll put you down for the rest of the night. "

"You'd put down an ally."

"Either I can trust you to do what I need you to do or I can't, Shiro! I've got your back—what I need you to do's watch mine. If you can't do that, I need you to tell me _now_."

Now and then—but he's thinking in the wrong tense again, mixing memory and desire, dreaming the ghost of a boy with a voice dark as longing out of this stranger, this iron-eyed thief. _Either I can trust you to do what I need you to do or—_

A thought without answer tics in his throat, a wire left to sway and spark. He crushes out its light, swallowing. "You know," Shiro says, the words nearly lost beneath the ruthless pulse of cannonshots, "I almost feel bad that you have to ask."

Too close, Keith laughs like a twist of smoke; Shiro tastes its sting in his teeth. "Almost."

"Well—you do leave a lot of angles open for them."

"Yeah, well," Keith says, lower. His mouth crooks. "Guess I figured you could use the work. Ready?"

Shiro breathes out, feels the way Keith shifts with his exhale. The rift's gone. He's here now. He knows, he knows. "When you are," he says.

Keith nods, turns as he rises. The shield comes down.

****

# *

****


	2. all that we see or seem

"Should've turned when I dodged, huh?"

"Stop talking. Hold still."

Their echoes waver and go out. Shiro hunches against the cot's edge. Keith's hand weighs on him like a bird perching; he winds the bandage over shoulder and arm in quick stripes, gauze rustling its cotton secrets into skin. 

Beat by beat, the world pulls back into focus: lights gone dim with the ship's docking, the steerage wall pocked and blotted with rust. The steerage's a slice of space crushed into the back of the flyer, no bigger than a foot snipped off a pyramid. They've made good use of it: a cot tucked under its heavy slope, its corners piled high with medgear, fit to patchwork anything from a broken bone to minor organ damage. A little pod squats in the farthest corner, all blue-lit shining and just big enough to fit a curled body inside; some dark-veined clump thuds and bobs through its humming waves. 

Pidge had punched the cockpit's eject and scrambled out as soon as they'd landed, off to negotiate their take for the spire job. ("Nyma hates people who don't talk when they negotiate. It weirds her out. Pidge likes it.") It isn't as if Shiro'd been in any position to protest. There's only Keith now: closer than ever with his hair rumpled dark, his thin-bitten mouth, a heap of bandages unraveled by his hip. 

"Sorry."

He says it clearly, but without direction—feels the glance that skims his jaw, the point where light spills down his cheek, before it flicks away. 

"No one died," Keith says, distant. "It could've gone a lot worse."

"Somehow," Shiro says, "I get the feeling that's not the right standard."

"It's been working so far. As long as we make it back to the ship, at the end of the day—nothing else matters."

The words carry with the rhythm of optimism but none of its song. Shiro closes his eyes. "It should," he says, though the thought's getting harder to hold onto. Light sputters beneath the lids, clinging like film. "You deserve to have more to hold onto."

A bandage's tearing shivers through the air. "Focus," Keith says. "I'm gonna use the microbotic layer. Tell me why you came here."

He looks away; his mouth crooks. "Is this an interrogation?"

"You already got hurt once today because you wouldn't listen to me," Keith says—but a hand's smoothing up the line of his arm, knuckling briefly as Shiro's arm knots tense. "That's not a record you want to set. Stop trying."

Shiro laughs. There's nothing else left in him. Memory, drifting back, finds only colors, shapes, shadows without voices, choices cut as if in stone. A pale ship, a circle of paladins standing together: black, green, red, blue, yellow. The cruiser's console stretched like bone before his open hands. An ending laid out in parts without a chart.

He has an answer, knows its metal down to the roots of his teeth—but this is a new universe. A good answer takes time to forge and reframe. He has the time now. "We were," Shiro says, "kind of in a hurry. The castle was under attack when I left. We had two options: we could protect the rift or take the rescue mission. In the end, we decided the best way to handle it was to send one person to the rift and seal it off. The cruiser needed to a pilot who had enough skill to dodge Lotor's maneuvers. In my universe—" The microbotic spray hisses, and he bolts into a wince. "You'd already taken over the Black Lion. I was the spare. She'd still accept me, but only if there was no other choice—only after you made it clear that you wouldn't take the responsibility. It was a pretty obvious answer."

"No."

A spark jumps on his flinty tongue. Shiro twitches his fingers; he doesn't look back. "I can't exactly find you proof now—but haven't we been over this already?"

Keith closes a hand over his bicep, steadying; the microbotic's going warm and slick through cotton. "You said _I_ was there, with you." His head's bowed, his voice sunk in to a rough murmuring. "That the Red Lion picked me first."

"No matter what lion you were in, " Shiro says, "you were a good leader." A snort prickles his nape, and he bows with it. "I'm serious. You had a rough learning curve—but who wouldn't? None of us were trained for the places where we ended up. The important things were on your side. You saved the people who had to be saved. The castle needed you. And you believed in doing the right thing. After a while, that was more than I could do. 

"I don't regret it," he tells the silence, the clenching stillness braced over his arm. "If I had to do it again, I'd make the same choice."

The microbotic clanks at the foot of the cot; he turns. Keith stares back, all dark-eyed intent fit to core every memory loose from his bones. "You're lying to me," he says, but there's nothing of that look in his voice: no accusation, only a quiet, bewildered aching. "You keep lying—I can _hear_ it."

 _I'm not_ —but deflection comes at a thousand angles. _Does it matter, if you don't trust me? What does lying even sound like, between us? How much are you going to bleed out of me before I'm weak enough for you to believe?_ "I'm sorry," Shiro says, giving in. "The things that brought me here—they're behind me now. I guess I just wanted to be selfish for a while."

"Selfish." In every world, Keith 's echoes curl like contempt. "What does that even _mean_?"

The words find him before any real thought does. "Of all the things I thought I'd find after the end of the world," Shiro says, "I wasn't expecting you."

Movement, then silence: a fist locking between them like an anchor, only the tick of the cooling engine to keep their time. It was, Shiro thinks too late, exactly the right thing to say to take him apart.

He stays where he's planted, waiting. "This ship," he says, when Keith doesn't. "It doesn't look like something Rolo and Nyma picked up. Did you bring it with you when you joined them?"

Keith shudders through an exhale; he drops against the bed. Their elbows brush; thigh stretches along thigh in parallel, suspended by inches. "It was a gift for Hunk. We went through this developing sector a couple years back. They already knew how to fly, but they wanted to make galactic travel easy for as much of the planet as possible. He helped out at one of their labs when they were developing commercial flyers, so they made sure they always had a model for him in the garages. It was," he says, bending to the foot of the bed, "one of the first planets we went to. After the castle. The Chancellor knows that we've got it, so we can't use it in the areas with a lot of surveilance—but it's locked to our voiceprints. Only the paladins of Voltron can access the controls. Bite down."

Shiro picks up the mischord in the same moment that the microbotic rattles and flares out. Another hiss wraps through his teeth. " _Wow,_ " He laughs through the stinging. "You aren't going easy on me."

"You don't know anything about me if you thought I would."

It rings like unkindness, like a challenge. But he knows better.

"Maybe I don't," Shiro says. "But I'm trying to learn."

Silence again: Keith's thin hands winding gauze, the jut of bone like lace, his back bowed into knots. An infinite distance crushed between them: all their little gaps like minefields, and every touch a spark. They are going to wreck each other: it's inevitable, fate layered into every spinning atom between them, a law coiled into his veins and marrows. 

He blinks himself out of dreaming apocalypses long enough to say, "I want to ask you something."

"You want to know what happened to the _you_ here."

He keeps jarring the wrong chords, one after another, the kind that _sorry_ can't pull back. "You don't have to tell me anything you don't want me to know," Shiro says, though it's the least of what he means.

Keith ducks his head. "He was," he says, and stops again to tug a gap's worth of breathing room into the bandages as they smooth and dry into gloss. It takes two tries. 

"He was the pilot on the Kerberos mission, too. The launch happened right before I turned eighteen. It wasn't supposed to take longer than twenty months. The Garrison announced that the mission failed before month ten. Even after they said it—I couldn't believe them. None of it made sense. He was the best pilot in the Garrison—that was why they _gave_ him the assignment. Someone like that doesn't just disappear. So I kept waiting for another explanation—for some kind of actual _answer_. I was still waiting when they kicked me out.

After I left, I lived out in the desert for a while. Eventually these cadets broke into the property. They kept saying that they were chasing some kind of frequency and it ran through my place. They thought it'd tell them something about the secrets behind the Kerberos Mission, what the Garrison knew about it. So I followed them. We found the Blue Lion, and she took us to the castle. That was when we met—"

His eyes snap down; his jaw sharpens, working white.

"Sounds familiar," Shiro says, and feels Keith's hard half-smile more than he sees its twist.

"I figured it would," he says. "Looking back, I think she knew we were never going to win the war without Voltron. Our one real hope was an intergalactic coalition. Working with other planets'd make it easier to stand up to Zarkon when we got there—and it'd give us a bigger pool of candidates for the Black Lion's pilot. She didn't have it easy at first, when she was trying to convince us to help out. The missions made it easier. She kept us on individual assignments, so we didn't have to work together as much. Gave us time to get used to everything. That way, we could keep going. We went from planet to planet, trying to help anyone we could. Eventually, we made it into one of the Empire's entertainment sectors. We found an arena.

Turns out—even if you're an arena champion, they don't really care about keeping you that way. The Galra like seeing how strong they can make a prisoner, and then they just keep making them fight until they lose. One way or another.

He must've been waiting for us for years. By the time we got to him, it didn't matter anymore. We took too long." A shadow shifts along the wall; his voice runs dry as dust. "He wore out."

"How bad was the damage?"

Just the status report, he means—nothing prying, nothing personal. But Keith's fingers drag along the bedding. "Pretty bad. We almost missed him. They had him loaded onto one of the armored medflyers when we arrived, and they just—left him there. Someone out there paid to have him fixed up, I guess. Just not enough for any of the techs or guards to try saving him when Voltron invaded. They used to do that, in the arenas," he says, with his mouth set in a pale crook, stripped bare as glass. "Bring back the old favorites. It made the new champions look better if they could kill the old ones in battle.

Both his arms were gone. One of his eyes—it was a mech implant. We couldn't figure out everything they did to him—I still don't know. But he barely recognized his own name.

We got him back to the castle. I think that was the worst part for him. All the upgrades the Galra put him through—it was patchwork stuff. The tech was wearing his body out faster than anything could heal him. We didn't know how much of it was chipped for tracking, and we didn't have the tools to figure out what we could take out without killing him _faster_. Coran and Hunk and Pidge tried everything—but there wasn't much the castle could help with. The most we could do was keep him asleep in the pod. They figured—maybe we'd get some information from him, on the days when he could think, before he finally gave out. 

Everyone knew we weren't going to save him. We weren't trying to. Not really. But I just kept going back to the pods. Just to see him. I couldn't stop.

After a couple of close calls, the princess made me a deal. We'd wake him up—dose him with anything in the castle supplies that could keep him painless without taking away his mobility. Just for a day. For one day, we'd land the castle on a planet outside of the Empire's warzones, and let him wake up, and walk around. After that, he could decide what he wanted to do."

Time pulls the quiet between them, sure as an undertow. Keith turns. He says, "You liked going to festivals when you were a kid, right?"

Universe to universe. _Be here with me,_ a boy had said with his fists against the door, pleading, _just be here_ \--

He shuts his eyes. _Focus_. Dream in images, not in sound. Trees drawn back to ragged silhouettes on the shores of ceaseless night. Thousands of paper globes crinkling as they swayed, winking candleflames in a little sea of constellations. Childhood and nostalgia in all their distant, winding smoke, idols long charred grey.

"They used to hold the mid-autumn festival in the park outside my neighborhood every year," Shiro says, with memory a slow burn in his lungs. "No one in my family cooked, but we'd check out the stalls. It's still the best tangyuan I've ever had."

"Well," Keith says, and stops to grimace a little over the rounded-strange syllables. " _Tangyuan_ would've been kind of tough to find in space. Even with Hunk around. We just looked for the closest planet that was celebrating when he woke up. They had a spring festival going. So I took him down to see it." 

"You did, huh."

"To be honest, I don't even remember most of the stuff they had there. It looked kind of like an open marketplace. So we just—walked. He couldn't go too fast, but they had plenty of stalls to look at along the way. He wanted to try everything—he tried to buy this _weird_ black ice cream. But he was talking—really talking to me. He told me stuff he remembered from when he was a kid. What things were like before the Garrison. 

We kept walking. Outside the fairgrounds, they had this track set up for old flyers—the ones that still had good engines but couldn't break the atmospheric limits anymore. And we just raced. All-out, as hard as we could go." Impossibly, Keith smiles, a brilliant reflection of some faraway alien star. "He won."

It's a smile for an unimaginable scene—some faceted dome with stoplights and vast shadows, its gravity magnetised and caged, or a wild playground stitched with tracks, light splaying gold across the rails like filigree. The planet and racing and day cling to theirsmears and blurry streaks—but he can imagine Keith there, on that final afternoon: bristling, wind-blown hair and cheeks stung red, grinning wide and wild, the way he must have done once for another boy under desert constellations.

"Did he—"

"Did he," Keith says, and Shiro stops. The silence rings between them like a ghost's white curse: _after everything you did to get to him, to wake him up, he didn't know his own name._

_Could he even remember yours, in the end?_

"I'm sorry," Shiro says.

"For what?"

 _For asking._ For the ache still roiling in one shoulder. For all the ways they still fall short of knowing each other, all these missed lines and knifepoint silences. For an exchange in a faraway castle's silverlit star-watching bay, Keith's hand warm through cloth, fingerpoints splaying in a constellation and his faultless voice ringing out: _Lance shouldn't have told you about Sven. It was a different universe, and it doesn't matter now—_

Too late he registers the rest: the palm flattening over his chest, all unsettled warm intent, and the shadow leaning through the dim with his dark eyes like a brand. "Keith," Shiro says. "I'm not him."

Memory trails memory through the dimness. It's a different time, a separate world, a stranger who's tilted into him now, his fingertips stiff and warm as sunstruck iron on Shiro's chest. But the air's warmer than he's had it since he'd shouted across the hall of a Galra ship, and Keith's eyes carry the same light of a desert sunrise.

"I don't think it matters," Keith says, "because I'm not the one you want, either."

_It doesn't matter, Shiro. Sven wasn't you. I knew that._

He breathes out, soft and quick, like a man sighing away a candleflame. A palm wraps around Keith's fingers. "You're not the one I remember," Shiro says. "But I'm pretty sure I still know you where it counts."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means," Shiro says, pulling each syllable as if from some deep undertow. "If you want this, Keith—you can have it. Back at the tower, you told me that I should have listened to you, and you were right. I'll follow you from here on out, for as long as you're willing to trust in me. But whatever we do from here on out—it's not nothing to me. I wouldn't be here if you weren't still—"

" _Stop_."

Keith's bolted stiff, though he hasn't pulled away; his black glare burns stark and thin as ink smeared over empty glass. "Why would you _say_ that? You've barely been on-board for a few weeks."

"For the same reason that I've ever told you anything."

"That—that's not how it _works_. People aren't so easy to replace. I'm not the one you remember, I'm not even a paladin anymore—I'm not _anything_."

His hand's jutting, knuckling, shaking where it clings to his shirt. The air's shifted between them, the kind of sea-change that rakes static across skin, the polarity of nostalgia reversed into sheer lightning. _I don't think it matters,_ he'd said, and meant, _as long as you can pretend._

In every universe, Keith's never been one for compromise.

Still Shiro doesn't stir. "In my world," he says, "I was a prisoner of the Galra, too. After all that's happened, I don't know what they did to me. I still don't know how much of—what I should have been, is left inside me. I gave a lot of orders I shouldn't have. I've had people look at me, trust me, take my advice even when they should've known better. In the right place, at the right time—I could still hurt a lot of people. But I'd trust you to stop me before it got that far."

"You can't know that," Keith bites out. "Not for sure."

"Like I said: I trust you."

Impact. 

Tumbling back he goes; the world reels into a tumult of studded iron and hazy lights. Keith leans over him, his ragged hair swaying, dark-eyed and brittle and barely tame. "I don't think you should."

But Shiro only lifts a hand—cradles his jaw, thumb brushing cool along its strung-white line. "Little late for that," he says, and Keith's flush deepens, the kind of livid red that should char.

They catch each other halfway. It's the kind of kiss that deserves thunder and vaporised light, bright as a meteor falling. Heartbeats lash by, rapidfire; mouth drags hot over mouth, working open into wet, savoring sounds, adrenaline charring through caution, a kiss fit to burn. Keith's palms skim down his torso and he's arching into the touch before he thinks twice, the fearless sweep of fingers mapping every silver-stitched scar, greedy for it—

Lightning flares down his spine.

" _Shiro_ ," Keith hisses. "Are you okay?"

He's dropped rigid against the springs. The bandages clump over his shoulder, hazy as a storm on the horizon. Shiro swallows, iron plating thick down his throat. "I've had worse."

Anything else he could say goes to steam under the live coal of a new kiss. "Not with me," Keith grates. The cot jounces once, a creaky warning. Reflex splays a metal hand over one hip as Keith straddles him, drags their hips together in a jarring, slow push that grinds a cascade of sparks beneath his eyelids.

"Keith," he manages, but Keith's kissing him still, ruthless and too sharp, too much. It's a mess, a little bit of a wreck, tongue pushing along his teeth as his grip tightens—but they work through it, murmuring and groaning by turns as they rock together into a tentative friction.

He tries to sit up. At once Keith's grip knuckles white. Sparks reel and snarl through the backs of Shiro's eyelids, and he reddens a little beneath the ache and absolute conviction of that force. "I don't want you to hurt yourself," Keith says, at odds with each fingertip gouging scars. "Just stay down."

He's still tense, stiff with care and fury—but beneath all the raw temper, there's still a familiar spark. A hand's reached out, moving without thought, to curl fingers under Keith's chin as he tilts his head up. 

"I'll let you know if you need to stop," Shiro says, through a feathery, coaxing kiss. "But I think I can handle you."

They keep kissing, touching all over, a tangle of heat and greed. Keith slings his shirt to puddle out of sight, gripping Shiro's hips to pin him down in casual possession. With metal fingers, he fumbles to drag open Keith's zipper—scratches sparks from steel before Keith pulls back to work them off, leg by leg. His palm sweeps up Keith's ribs, nets a flinching half-squirm before Keith's fingers lace around his wrist, pinning them against the blankets.

They lock in place under a dark-eyed hush. "You're going to hurt yourself," Keith says.

Shiro laughs, all rust. "I'm not sure this'll work too well if I can't touch you."

"You're not sure."

It's the kind of exchange where conversation's a distraction: Keith's exhale hot in his teeth like a current; his eyes lidding as he rocks up and feels Keith yield for him.

" _Keith_ ," he drawls, and the effect hits like a cascade: he's clasping at the angle of a shoulderblade, the bow of his spine, holding on as Keith works his trousers open with one hand. A zip, a jerk, and his exhale shivers out like steam as his cock curves into Keith's grip.

Keith's rough with him: fist curling hard, all calluses and relentless strokes without rhythm. Static grates down Shiro's spine; he spares a moment to _ache_ before Keith's pressing another noise into his mouth, wet and grim and wanting at once, and he loses the rest of the sensation to adrenaline. 

Touch blurs into touch, bodies caught in a long line of friction. There's a pulse, a sting caught on the edges of his lips. Shiro licks the salt off, slides a hand beneath the tangli warm hand slides under the tangling hair, cradles Keith's jaw fit to reframe it. "Tell me what you want."

"What do you _think_?"

The question surges, a dull throb that tides through his veins. Keith's already hard against his hip, flushed and bare-legged, grinding along his thigh like he can't help the need. "Right," Shiro says, and draws him down into a new kiss, helpless and coaxing. "All right. What do we have to work with?"

Keith's eyes lid open, sweeping over the rumpled cot, trousers barely rucked open and the blankets crushed to seams and folds beneath them. "Help me—get your pants off."

An awful, overeager tumult ensues, a whirlwind of trouser-legs and narrowly misplaced elbows, the kind that's only ever funny after the danger of cock-spraining has faded into memory. He lands on his knees in the end, hands splayed along the wall with Keith's fingers skimming down his spine. "Wait," Shiro says. "You'll need something if you want to—"

"I'm not going to _hurt_ you, Shiro," Keith says, red-eared and incredulous in a single shot.

His body slackens, cut loose from a tension he feels too late. "Never thought you would," Shiro says.

He doesn't ask the second question—only waits, tense in trust, as Keith kneels behind him, rustling cotton and bedsprings. Breath crackles on skin like winter static. They've lost the rhythm somewhere in all the tumbling around, and the first slide's barely a tremor, just the rough, quick push of Keith's cock along the base of his spine, sliding up through the cleft, before a hand's wrapped around his cock again.

The dizzy rush works back between them by drags and jolts, with Keith's chest warm through the thin cotton of his shirt and his dark head bowed close, their shared silence torn up into little fissuring gasps.

Into the hush, Shiro says, "Did you ever think about doing this?"

A broken noise cracks the line of his shoulder. "No," Keith says, breathy and too low. His grip flexes, and Shiro groans, wracked and heady, just to feel the way Keith shudders for his sound.

"You've got me, Keith," he says, and shuts his eyes, savoring the rattle in his teeth. "It's all right. Keep going."

Keith starts to say something, warning or caution or desperate plea, but his fingers are working through another pull, wringing tight just to hold him on the dizzying edge as his cock slides between his cheeks, friction close enough to taste it.

"You have no idea," Shiro says, and the impact of that tears through him in a fever, too late: that this is _Keith_ , flushed and bruising by turns, frustration brought to devastating life, thrusting up against him until he's panting in smoke-rough drags, high off the pulse of Keith's cock hot against his skin. "You really have no idea. What you do to me—the things I'd _let_ you do to me."

"Like— _what_."

"Anything," Shiro promises. "Anything you want. You could spread me out, push me down, and I'd take it from you for hours. You wouldn't even have to leave the pilot's chair, if you didn't want to—just kick your legs open and let me use my mouth after a mission. I'm pretty sure the real question's what _you_ want. What would you do to me, Keith? If we had all the time in the world."

Stroke after stroke jars off-rhythm. Keith's breath fractures; his fingertips grind bruising points down the backs of Shiro's ribs, fucking up against him in quick strokes of friction like he's already thinking about taking it, like he can't stop. There's something unreal to this: how much Keith gets off to being goaded and spurred on, the way they sound together, how badly he still _wants_ down to his marrows in spite of everything. 

"I think I asked you a question," Shiro says.

"Everything," Keith gasps. " _Everything_ , Shiro, I just—"

But the rest gutters out—he's shaking already, too close to do more than _need_. "You've got me," Shiro says, an echo of himself, soft and reckless, unraveling. "All right? You know that—you've _got_ me. We'll prove it however you want. Make me work for it—mark me up. I'm yours."

It's too much. Noise rakes into his nape, half-name and halfway into sheer animal sound—Keith crushes the rest out into cotton as he heaves, trembling, coming in stripes over his back.

His hand's still on Shiro's cock when Shiro pushes off the wall, wraps his fingers over Keith's knuckles. The world's fringing with gold, charging and brightening in every vein. There's salt caught at the backs of his teeth, a groan, a pulse, Keith's weight listing against his back, mouthing shapeless murmurs against his skin, more than he's ever deserved. 

He shuts his eyes, works himself over until sensation crests and shorts out.

The aftermath skips and tumbles by, time blurred out of focus. They surface again to a tangle of limbs, knees folded over thighs and sticky all over. The air reeks of them, filthy with sweat and worse. The sheets cling as he shifts, sticking to wrists and hips. Keith's still a wreck, not quite fucked but flushed close enough to pass, red and dazed, his lips bruising-dark as he blinks, shifts an elbow to lever himself up.

Shiro snags an arm before he rises. "Wait," he says. "Stay with me."

Keith stares, brows furrowing. "You're going to bleed through that, Shiro," he says, at his most darkly reasonable, and too late Shiro registers the ache churning through his arm, on the brink of a heavy throb. "And you're—getting stuff on the blankets."

"If you're not washing these anyway, I'm going to be a little concerned."

"Are you sure—"

"You know, I'm not contagious," Shiro says, and reaches out, thumbing along a collarbone for proof. "Just a little sweaty."

Keith stills; he bows his head. He rolls back in the end, pressing an open-mouthed grumble into Shiro's skin, half-intimacy and half-complaint beneath the buzz of Shiro's soft, unraveled laughter. But he doesn't resist as Shiro curls fingers beneath his jaw, only tilts up like he'd demand no less—like there's no barriers left between them. Just this: these thin shadows, this lasting quiet, breath after breath spooled between them, holding aloft some glimmer of warmth and absolution at last.

****

# *

****

He wakes to a buzz ringing through the walls.

The engine rolls on beneath his heels, a storm at rest. Shiro dresses in silence; he scrubs off the most tell-tale stains with a spare length of bandages, and picks his way out to the hold. By the third corridor, the buzz's sharpened into familiar sounds: error bells, alarms, and a voice he knows.

He ducks into the tents, nearly knocking into Keith standing rooted at by the flaps, arms knotted and head snapped high. The sheets are rioting with lights, map projections overlapping building layouts, diagrams whistling and blazing over every sheet. Only Pidge holds fast in the hurricane's eye, rattling away at her keyboard with her lenses struck like matchfires. 

"Keith," Shiro says. "What's happening?"

Keith opens his mouth, then twists away. A heartbeat tears him across the room to slam a fist into the farthest map: a flight itinerary from system to unfamiliar system, with a single name beating beneath his knuckles. "The Chancellor," he says, "just landed in Mhiere." 

_The Chancellor,_ a title bitten through like splintered bone. There's a thought he's missing—but there's no space to ask. Whatever its history, it means something to Keith. "All right," Shiro says, slower. "What do you need?"

"What do we _need_?" Keith rattles off a laugh. "More time. A crew that isn't so scared. Anything that gets her guard _out of the system_. Rolo and Nyma aren't going to want to go anywhere near the planet while one of the Galra's biggest allies is still on the landing with the entire Galra honor guard."

"The job's over. You shouldn't need to go back to the system. Unless—" Pidge snaps him a look, all glass-eyed judgment, and Shiro stops. "You think the theft didn't make a difference. The Chancellor's going to risk galactic publicity and take the pod anyway."

"Pidge's been reading the feeds since last night. There's a fleet of pre-approved merchant ships from her sector that's set to take off tomorrow. She thinks the Chancellor's going to bring down the pod and take it out in one of them, and blame it on the thefts from yesterday."

"What if we warn Mhiere?"

"Mhere's just one planet. The Galra Empire has at least a couple hundred galaxies by now. If she sells their artifacts back to them, they might not even care about the missing pod." His fists shiver at his sides. "There's only one option left."

 _One option_ , he says, like the first key of a detonation sequence. It comes down to the pod again, the ore and the heart of all their plans: a lodestone in every universe. _I made them_ dim memory says, out of nowhere, _from the quintessence-infused ore of the comet, which provides them with an endless supply of power. The comet alloy also renders them nearly—_

"Last time," Shiro says, too slow. "Before we went down, you said that you _destroyed_ the Black Lion. If everything about the ore's the same between universes, that shouldn't be possible."

Keith stares; his face flares pale, as if bracing against some impact unseen. "We made sure that no one else could get to it," he bites out. "It was close _enough._ "

"Taking the pod wouldn't resolve anything. It'd put us on the run with both Mhiere and the Chancellor on our bacsk. I'm guessing that Rolo and Nyma wouldn't be too happy to keep three of the Galra Empire's most wanted around once they figured it out—unless you thought that you could get rid of it completely before anyone caught up." Piece by piece, the world's sliding together into the wrong shape. "There's another rift here, isn't there?"

Twisting, Keith reaches through a snarl of silhouettes, drags a crumbling piece from one part of the orbit to another. "We didn't know," he says. "Before you came along, no one knew what was on the the other side. The only thing we knew for sure was that they _worked_. When you push something into the light, it goes through and it doesn't come back."

"And you pushed the Black Lion in," Shiro says. "That must've taken some setting up."

"There's a rift in the Phrynne sector, less than half a light-year away from a black hole. We used a nuclear anti-gravity device to trigger a supernova in the closest system. Pidge used some of the old Altean rigs to run the calculations. Now that all three of them're in orbit, the Galra'll never be able to get close to the Black Lion again."

"That kind of controlled detonation shouldn't be possible by remote, even for Altean technology. And if you couldn't pilot it—"

Pidge lifts her head as Keith's eyes flick back, constant as the stars. "Turns out," he says, "a lion of Voltron really can survive almost anything."

Shiro breathes out. "The Green Lion."

They'd lost the Green Lion to Keith's planning. It doesn't take any new knowledge of him, of all the ghostly changes and trivia that must've rippled through this left-turn universe, to know how he must have taken it.

"We didn't have a choice," Keith says. "The Green Lion's the only one with the ability to project a permanent cloaking field. We _had_ to keep the lions out of Zarkon's hands. So we used Green to push the Black Lion into the rift, triggered the detonation, and flew out while the star collapsed. After that—we let her drift under cloaking. No one knows where she is now."

"That's it? What if you had to go back?"

"To do _what_?"

It lashes across the hollow, ruffling maps and billowing each sheet. Only Keith stays bolted in place, a bristling, desperate shape with locked fists and a knifing black stare.

"It didn't matter what we did—it wouldn't have changed _anything_. Lance used to run his missions off the rails for every girl we ran into. Hunk just stayed in the kitchen and cooked all the time. After she unlocked the Altean databases, Pidge barely talked to any of us—I didn't even find out she was pretending to be a Garrison student until after the castle defenses went down. Even if we'd had five paladins, there would've _never_ been a Voltron. The only way the lions were going to be used was against us. The war ended a long time ago, Shiro—they already _won._ All that matters now—"

He stops short. His fists jerk and still; the words die on his tongue like sparks withering off flint scraped bare. 

"All that matters," Keith says, steadier, "is that we get out of this alive. If we can stop the Chancellor from getting the pod, we should. But I'm not going to risk you and Pidge to make sure of it."

_You're putting the lives of two people over the lives of everyone else in the entire galaxy._

It's a practical limit. They're three thieves against an empire and all its allies. Without the lions, the castle, the coalition, they don't have the resources to stage a siege. Still, Shiro thinks, he might still feel that long-lost voice shaking in his veins if he listens—the boy that he'd known in another world like a ghost grappling for possession, an echo who haunts his heartbeat. Keith as he'd known him would have seen the mission's cost and hurtled after it. But there's nothing of that conviction left in this quiet fury, like a single gasping candle set against a universe's darkness and all its cold stars.

Shiro says, "What about the merchant ships?"

"What?"

"Your problem's that Mhiere's going to miss the theft if the Chancellor takes the pod in the next few days. If we go back and sabotage the fleet, that leaves her with three options. She'll have to make a deal with someone outside the Empire to take the pod, risk damaging the ore by collecting it with a non-commercial loading ship, or wait for the next opportunity. And waiting it out," Shiro says, a little wry, "doesn't tend to be anyone's ideal plan."

A breath reels into his lungs, slow and slower—grinds itself to ash before he exhales. Keith stares back, all dark-eyed distance. "You think we should go back."

It is, and isn't, a real question. He wears the same scars as Takashi Shirogane; some lurid trick of the universe's crammed him with most of the same memories. But Keith knows him just enough to see all the angles where he doesn't match up to name or need: all his too-clumsy turns, his shouts at the wrong moment, his collateral damage. There's no love lost between them in this two-faced universe, and never was.

It doesn't matter.

"Because you do," Shiro says, and makes it just that easy—truth like a matchlight, faint but shining. This, now, is his duty to take. "It's a risk, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. All we need's the right plan."

****

# *

****

With true pirates' courtesy, they only filch a quarter of Rolo and Nyma's savings from the ship's vault when they go.

"Don't," Keith says. He drops into the pilot's seat, bending both arms in the gruesome, disgruntled flex of a pilot wasted on three hours of luggage-toting. 

"Don't," Shiro echoes. "That's all you have to say."

"We _earned_ that money. Their vault's probably doubled since we came on board, and we've never asked them for anything. This is just backpay."

Distance's already blotting their ship into a glimmer. Above the console, Pidge ignores them both in favor of tweaking five holofeeds at once. Dials and diagnostics lash across the windshield in a score of projections, and she works through them, a harpist composing a private digitised sonata.

Under her mechanical arpeggios, Shiro scrapes fingers down a temple. "That's not really my point," he says, with the valiant patience befitting a man resigned to a life of crime. "Pidge managed to carry out enough money to buy a small continent somewhere, and she still got the engine running before we finished packing. Should she be driving right now?"

Keith slouches forward, swipes a control panel across his own rounded screen. "She's the only one who's worked on this ship for the last two years. If we can't trust her driving, we might as well throw ourselves out of the airlock now."

"About that," Shiro tells him, and shifts a knee against the back of his seat for emphasis. "Surprisingly, a ship doesn't grow with time. I think I might be stuck back here."

Keith's mouth crooks. "You could've taken a seat in the cargohold," he says, with a dry and cautious light. It beats between them like a star filtering out of an eclipse. "You seemed pretty comfortable on the cot last time."

Shiro opens his mouth.

On cue, a blotchy chorus of beeps and mechanics shrieks reels across the console. A new projection flicks motes from thin air, scratching and sharpening into shape: a faraway star, blackness awash in constellations of dust, and a blocky, familiar cot flipping away in lazy swoops through space, foot over headboard, its blankets swaying like gutted wings in the cruiser's rearview camera.

" _Pidge_ ," Shiro says, bewildered, as outrage bolts Keith upright. 

"Wait, you threw it _out_? Why?"

Pidge's glance knifes over one shoulder from one face to another, brows drawn dark over her flatlined mouth. Her dead eyes speak volumes.

They rework the plan five times over the flight, arguing methods and escape routes with Pidge dredging up diagrams and jangling alarms in scathing counterpoint to Keith's fervent, snarling promises that he could outfly every pilot on Mhiere, and _will_ , while Shiro props a boot against the back of his seat and reviews the standard equipment and last uploaded schedules for the hangar patrols. Security's shot up across the city in the wake of Mhiere's last incident, splashed the newsreels in a flash-flood of publicity. Every page's blotted with interviews and profiles of bank and private compounds baring their technological fangs—but none of it any match for Pidge rounding out a five-day caffeine bender.

Judging by the way that the Chancellor's visit surfaces five times in three articles, it isn't just theft that Mhiere's warding off.

Somehow, despite an overload of caffeinated, reckless, insomniac pilots on-board, they hit orbit within a day, and get cleared to land without incident. Mhiere etches itself across the windshield in the same mountain range of spires and stately domes, lush and lit beneath an ivory sky with the firefly lights of a hundred mechanical wings. The merchant fleets lie in wait a few miles north from the capitol's railstitched downtown, in the hangar of Mhiere's biggest open-air market.

 _Open air_ turns out to be a vast understatement. The market sprawls like a city in itself, more empire than emporium, spiraling with sugar-pale spires and garish, metallic paint. Even the hangar entrance's been wrought into a spill of scales and fangs, daylight striking gold off its coiled hinges. The good news is that, in an alien market, neither tourist nor guard's inclined to turn their heads for a trio of pilots in the standard grey flightsuits.

The bad news is that it's huge.

At the foot of the cruiser, Pidge and Keith swap looks sidelong. She twists two fists together as he sweeps a hand from lot's edge to the market's lamp-lit entrance; in the same beat, they hold up three and four fingers apiece. There's nothing furtive about the exchange, Shiro thinks, no real effort to exclude—just a language turned secret by habit and a history that's outlived any other witnesses. 

They turn in separate directions. Shiro heads after Keith.

At rest, stripped of cargo, the fleet's security protocols have been turned down to minimum levels. They spend the better part of three hours loitering in the parking lot, following up on Pidge's meandering trail through the fleet. Keith feels out and disables each forcefield's anchor; he stands guard while Shiro secures a tiny tick of a synchrolock in discreet corners and crannies within projecting range of the ship bridge.

"It used to be pretty standard op for fleet pirates," Keith says, when Shiro asks. They've stopped beside a junk-sailer, a riot of flared decorative sails and bamboo patterns, its slim curving hull draped in the worn coils of an iron serpent. Military habits keep their hands behind their backs as they lift their heads, following its blunt, polished snout, the thread of its copper-worn tongue. "These're all from the same Galra fleet—so they already have an override that lets the flagship sync their movements with the rest of the ships. We're just making sure that _all_ their commands get overridden. Once Pidge triggers the synchrolock, they should be able to take off and break orbit, but any other flightplans'll get knocked out. We just have to follow them until they get far away enough from the planet, and bounce a link-bomb from ship to ship. It should take out the entire fleet."

"And it'll look like mechanical error without having to get Mhiere involved."

"That's the plan."

"And after that?"

Keith glances at him, a half-question spoiled by the fringe matted over his eyes. He twitches a shrug. "We probably have to run smaller operations for a while. After they hit Mhiere, Rolo and Nyma were planning to head out to the older sectors conquered by the Galra Empire. It shouldn't take the Chancellor long to figure out the connection between us. Pidge figured she'd be onto us a year ago. We can get a new ship somewhere, but we'll have to stick around planets colonised in the last few centuries until the news dies down."

It sounds right, sounds practiced and sure in a way that Keith had never been back in a universe gone obsolete. Too practiced, maybe—Keith's always lived by justifications and defenses. His is a self-armoring faith that counts on war.

_I'm not going to risk you and Pidge._

In silence, Shiro flexes a fist behind his back, weighing tendon and steel, and watches Keith's gaze sweep down the row for the next likely ship. "Whatever you decide," he tells Keith's shadow. "I'm with you."

They keep going, winding past the looming shadows of different ships, fat frigates and skeletal racers. Here and there, Pidge's left them signs: a coin or a gleaming button just inside the leftmost corner of the parking space, to show that the ship will occupy a critical point in the formation. By the second-last level, it's Keith who's loping up to the deck to plant the synchrolocks while Shiro loiters outside.

There's no signal or change in the air. The hush hangs over the lot in a lingering glow, broken only by the faint grind of engines below, shoppers murmuring as they clamber up and down the vast striped staircases. No crashing, no guards, no alarms.

Shiro shifts his weight. "Keith," he murmurs, and kicks at Pidge's coin. Its metal scrapes over the pavement, shrill as a bird's cry, but no dark head comes glaring over the starboard.

He counts off to seven, then turns. Up he climbs, over the emergency rails and sideways along the steely, sea-colored ridges of the crescent ship. A single lamp's burning in the bird's nest, just beneath its hook, where its crew must keep watch on trips. Keith's tucked himself into its corner, barely out of sight. His hands are empty, but he's turned his head against the windshield. Through the glass, a dented light flashes over the pocked iron grate of a speaker, a beating signal.

" _Keith._ "

Instinct flares through him, fire and brute force.

" _Keith,_ " it says again, an electrified murmur through the dented intercom. " _You're here. I know you're listening. I have her. Come to the ship in P35. Keith—_ "

"Keith," Shiro says, in blank echo, and reaches out as Keith jerks and sways against the bars. "Careful. Who is that?"

"I don't _know_."

It crackles in the thin air. Reflex snaps up both their heads, but the lot's still empty below. He catches Shiro's eye and his shoulders settle, fencing back the words gritting in his teeth like ash. "We have to go," Keith says. " _Now_."

They race from ship to rooftop, winding furious coils through the rows to a pale, stately tomb of a ship. The gangplank's already lolled onto the landing. The deck's empty. A quick blast of filtering spray through the air reveals no lasers or trapped panels, but it doesn't matter: Keith's already battered to the paneled doors by the time the last of the haze eddies out. 

The red bayard flashes into his hand and he slams it between the doors, prying them apart like fangs.

"Keith," Shiro says as the locks clank and disengage, but Keith's already pushing through.

The ship's bridge curves pale and cool as a pearl's heart. A circuit ribbons through its glossed walls, a living blue vein racing out to some unseen heart. The vast navigational windows have been blacked out, screen by screen. Beneath their false night, a woman lifts her head.

"Thank you," she says, "for coming."

Her back's still turned; her fingers spider across the navigational console, tapping the familiar song of a new lock-code into the panel. Galran armor hides her shape beneath the same anonymous design fitted to every commander: flared shoulder-pads and livid stripes over black padding. Spines rattle from each shoulder—two spikes, Shiro remembers in a dizzy lash of memory, the mark that indicates a formal, permanent outpost.

Armor and color lash through him first—but he doesn't need to stretch his memory to filter the rest: a white collar flashing over the throat of her armor, the pale hair knotted above her nape, the resolute line of a jaw grown lean with age, the marbled blue eyes and summer-darkened skin. 

"Allura," Shiro says.

" _Stay right where you are._ "

The bayard flashes. Keith's already thundered between them, blade swinging and his whole body bolting taut. Shiro starts forward, and stops again as red beams through one eye, another: the air quakes as three lasers go spinning over his chest, settles on his forehead like a target.

"Keith," he says, and Keith snaps back a glare.

"Enough." Allura wrenches at the sleek, sheathing point of each glove. A click resounds between the walls. "We haven't much time, Keith, you must—"

But Keith whirls, all knuckles and grit. "Whatever you have to say, I already _know_ it's not worth my time. Where is she?"

Her lashes sink; Allura turns a cheek. "I wouldn't have shown myself for anything less than a worthwhile cause," she says, with the same belling cool of a girl five years younger. "My personal guard's cornered her. They'll bring her along shortly. But I need you to understand the danger that you're facing."

"What are—" Staring, the bayard twitches in his fingers. "You're kidding. Is that a threat?"

" _Listen to me, Keith_. I requisitioned a merchant's fleet from the Uniform Commercial Council for this transaction. They don't monitor their ships, and the use of a neutral shipment handler reflects well on relations between the Galra Empire and third-party systems; it suggests that they may be inclined to respect the sovereignty of future planets. Lotor has no reason to suspect that a standard ship inspection has anything to do with rebellion."

"What Lotor wants isn't my problem."

"Do you think I enjoy having it be _mine_?" The spikes shiver along her armor, but she lifts her chin, straight-backed and unwavering. "This is a rare opportunity for us—generally I'm not permitted to leave my sector without detailed restrictions. Five spies have been hired to report on my movements for this trip. I don't have the time to reassure you. Are you aware that you're traveling with some form of Galra prototype?"

After all of Keith's blade-sharp answers, the stillness is jarring.

"You didn't know," Allura says. Her eyes hold Shiro with wintry clarity. "I had diagnostics taken of the surveillance from your recent siege at the shipment spire. Even beyond the technology he's attached to himself, parts of him were generated using some form of druid magic. I won't begin to imagine what he's said, or how long he's been with you—or even if he's _aware_ of the risk that he poses. It's irrelevant. He cannot be trusted."

Keith's shoulders grind flat; a laugh rusts in his teeth. "Right," he says. "Because we're supposed to trust _you_ instead. That worked out pretty well last time."

"Keith."

He's drawn his voice back from the silence at last, blade from sheath. His hands drift up to either side of his head, gesturing unconditional surrender. 

"She's not wrong," Shiro says, and it rings inside the blackened windows, trembling in the cool pearling of the lamps. "I did lie to you. I'm not the Shiro you remember—I'm not even the Shiro _I_ remember."

At the corner of his eye, the red bayard wavers. "What," Keith says, too slow. "What are you talking about?"

_Shiro—what're you saying?_

The echo lashes through him, lightning caught in double-vision, stinging beneath his eyelids. But it's worse this time, Keith's steel and his coal-bright stare crumbling to ash, all his armoring years stripped down again to a boy long lost. His head jerks down; Shiro laughs—laughs, ragged, with the targetpoints of three automated lasers trained on his skull, because there's nothing left in him but secrets and raw sound. "Turns out the Galra ran experiments on me in more than just one universe. In mine, they took Takashi Shirogane, and they made copies of him. Copies that they could control. I was Subject Y0XT39—the first successful prototype in Operation Kuron. They must've done something to me, because when they sent me back to Voltron—"

"I asked you not to lie," Keith says. He's staring, however Shiro turns or grits against it, he feels the weight of those eyes, starry and charring and impossibly fixed, fit to core the marrows out of him. "I really—wanted to trust you. And you just kept—"

"I did."

" _Why_?"

 _Because_ , he wants to say, because and no more. Because of the way Keith had looked at him for a little while. The crook of his mouth, all easy promise, as he'd pressed a hand against the door—living proof that you could want something without object or end, just that simple and that true. Because of a smile that could have remade a universe. 

_As many times as it takes._

The alarm blares, and Allura keys a quick pattern into the lock. The doors part to an armored guard; it strides through, arms shackling a whirlwind of cloak and kicks.

" _Pidge_ ," Keith says, and her name spills out of him like something gutted. The guard drops her. She goes tumbling across the floor, fists cinching against her ribs. Her eyes come up, flaring above the rims of her glasses, but Keith's already thudding to his knees at her side. 

One hand knots over his, steadying each other. One after another, their heads turn, burning defiance in the bridge's dim-lit hollow. "Once we're out of here," Keith says, on a knife-edged breath, "I'm going to give you the death you should've had a long time ago."

Allura laces her fingers before her. "I'll deserve whatever I leave myself open to. Until then—we've much to review, and very little chance to get it wrong."

"Did you seriously call us in here thinking you could _buy_ us?" 

"Keith," Shiro says. "Maybe we should hear her out."

" _Hear_ her—" His gaze reels from corner to corner like a searchlight skidding ocean waters. "You remembered Voltron. That means you know _her_ , too, right? Except you don't remember the part that really matters—"

"Keith, you mustn't—"

"Maybe she's still a princess in your universe. Over here, she gave that up a long time ago. Why do you think we keep running? Who do you think could catch up to my flying and Pidge's plans? She's the one who used to _plan_ our missions—she knew every place we could run after the castle went down. As soon as Lotor gave her a title, she took it. All so that she could hold onto power in his new _regime_."

New Taea-Galax's Chancellor Allura, once of Altea, turns her head. "That has nothing to do with the situation at hand." 

Shiro steps forward, sure-footed beneath the firefly jittering of lasers across his skin. "Keith," he says, but Keith's still staring up, stark-eyed and wild as Pidge trembles on her knees.

"She let you die! She let Hunk and Lance and hundreds of other people _die_ —"

"So that billions could live," Allura shouts, and bites her lips together. Her fists shudder at her sides, as if gritting back some unseen hilt. "Whatever judgment, whatever consequences you have for me, I won't deny that I deserve _worse._ The crimes that you'd blame me for are hardly half of what I've done by now. But without the Black Lion, we could never form Voltron—we never stood a chance in resisting Zarkon, even after Lotor rose against him—"

She stops, bowed over, choking on her own sound. 

"You came looking for us for a reason," Shiro says. Under the weight of all their silence, Allura lifts her brilliant eyes. "I think now would be a good time to tell us why."

With tender fingers, she touches one wrist, then the other, restless and sedate. "Yes," Allura says, in an ashen voice. "Thank you. My negotiations with the Galran Empire have reached a critical stage. Emperor Zarkon may have fallen, but King Lotor still sees uses for the asteroid's ore. He antipated that Voltron's former paladins might seek to interfere with him. In the event that Keith and Pidge returned, my instructions were to lure them to me by whatever means I thought necessary, to secure information of where they'd left the three remaining lions. In exchange, he would promise to deliver certain refugees to my sector—and to guarantee immunity for all systems under my control."

"So you sold us out again."

"You'll notice," Allura hisses, "the lack of Galra soldiers around me. I haven't done anything that could endanger you. The newsfeeds have been broadcasting updates of my arrival for weeks. Haven't you seen even one? Three have managed to secure live interviews with me; in the background of each, I've managed to play a sound file which contains an encrypted transmission with relevant information. After I leave, I intend to tell Lotor that Mhiere would rather destroy itself than subject its people to the rule of the Galra Empire. It won't stall him for long, but the delay will buy you a head start. What you do with that distance will be up to you."

Keith's frame locks even as Pidge's grip grinds into bone. "None of that matters if we still can't _trust_ you."

"I realise that. But this is the best of what I can offer."

There's no apology in the words—Allura hasn't changed that much. But gone's the girl who had risen from dreamer to strategist within a day of tumbling out of her cryopod. Her shoulders hold in a horizon's unbroken line beneath her Galran armor, with the heavy gravitas of a body used to holding her own. There's no one left to stand at her back.

"You did the best that you could," Shiro says. Keith starts at his side, and stops as he holds out a hand. "I'm not going to say that we're going to follow your tips blindly—but getting here couldn't have been easy for you. Whatever you've been sending out for us, we're not going to waste it."

For the first time since they'd stumbled in, Allura looks at him. Her blue stare refocuses, the way a tourist might see the pane after the stained glass.

"Activate theta wave scanner," she tells the thin air, ringing. The lasers jolt and stop. With a grinding whine, a projector wheels out from an alcove above the door. Pidge's head snaps down, whole frame knotted and shaking beneath her cloak, but the light's already shot between them: a spotlight which pools wide around Shiro's boots, draping him in silver. 

A diagram flits open at Allura's wrist, some electric tide sloping through the poles of an unreadable grid. 

"You." It flinches out of her, blank and wondering. Allura steps off the platform; her wrists sway at her sides, weaponless. "This can't be possible—but it should have been you, shouldn't it? All those years, and we were never able to find anyone who could—"

The light bursts.

The projector's whine shrills and ratchets up—an agonised, blaring note fit to crack glass, and drain marrow, blaring like a needle being pushed through the links of his spine. Shiro drops to his knees, feels in his bones the thud of Keith and Allura dropping after, just as the light _snaps_ apart.

Sound drops out. The room blooms with lasers, red lights whipping from every direction into a thrumming, glaring haze, hot enough to prickle the nape of his neck. From the floor comes a click, a rustle, and the beginnings of footsteps.

The wrist-projector's winding itself shut as Pidge drifts towards the bridge's white steps. Lasers bend and sway around her, and she passes through their parted seas in a cold, dreaming sequence. The green bayard glints in her hand, then flashes, arching and loosening into a grappling cord.

"Pidge," Allura whispers.

Pidge turns her head.

The hook drops around her throat, lightless even as its cord pulls tight. Shock burns her eyes wide—and then Allura's flinging herself through the nest of lasers, lunging for her. Pidge reels out of the way and she goes stumbling past. The lights hiss and spin. Lines char black, then red, then bone-white through her cracking armor. A shriek boils the air, and she's turning as Allura does, both hands grinding fast over the grappling hook's handle as Allura collapses, struggles and writhes and pleads through the red-slicked crack of her throat, choking out surrenders, a plea, a name, you mustn't, Pidge, _please_ —

In the end, the pleading stops.

The bayard withers back to its handle. Pidge curves up her empty hands; with blank eyes, she considers her fingers, the floor, and the body, smokeless and blackened where it went sprawling. "Deactivate lasers," she says, in a red and ragged voice.

The web flashes out.

Sourness swells at the back of his throat, clotting ash and bile. He makes a sound—and it's only sound at first, silence charred into wordless animal grief. "Why—" Shiro manages at last. "Why would you _do_ that?"

Pidge's head snaps up. "You. Of _all people_ , you don't get to talk to me right now."

"You just killed our best chance of brokering some kind of connection with—"

" _There was never going to be a connection._ "

"Pidge," Keith says, and she whirls on him.

"You can't be that desperate, Keith! You said it yourself—she was going to _lie_ to us again. And he was going to _let her_. Don't you see it? He's not—he's not even the _real one_." She wheels on him, lenses flashing like glass scarred over with a tangle of stars. "My dad used to tell me stories about Takashi Shirogane. Even after I got onto the ship, after the real Shiro died, after everyone left—Keith'd talk about you. When Allura brought the castlel's particle barrier down, he came looking for me and we ran for it, and he never gave up on fighting the Galra _because he couldn't forget you_. I don't care what kind of hero you remember being—there's nothing left to save because of her. My mom," she says, fast and cracking, "my mom's never going to see any of us ever again, and if I can't give her back my family, I can at least make sure that _I get the one person who did that to her_."

But a red light's tiding through the room in waves. A deep droning resounds through the floor: the rising tide of ship's alarms swelling and waking. In an instant, Keith's scudding across the room. He seizes Pidge's arm, twisting for the door. "We have to get out of here," he says.

They run.

****

# *

****

"You don't have to do this."

It rings through the cargohold. He hunches in the hold's rounded doorway. His fists grind against the crooks of his elbows, locked against impulse; the line of his jaw jumps, electric.

Pidge's crouched at the foot of the little blue tank—the cryopod, drained but still luminous. Its dials spin beneath her bustling fingers, and screen after screen lights across the little display. "I adjusted some of the tranquiliser levels," she says, low and clinical, as if they're only talking about basic maintenance, as if she hadn't gone savagely mute again through the long ride out from Mhiere. "Since this is a smaller version, I can't be in there for more than two weeks at a time anyway. If you really hurt yourself, we still have three cans of dermispray on the shelf. The black ones."

"You said you didn't get _burned_ back there. We got out, and we took everything we needed with us. You don't need to—"

"That's not the point. I just need some distance. Just for a while." She strips off her glasses, folds them and offers them to him, but he only stares at her bird-frail hands. "I can't keep going, Keith. Not like this."

"Like _what_?"

Pidge holds his eyes until Keith looks away. She hooks her glasses in his shirt, cool as habit, and turns. "Check my vitals every eighteen days," she says, without looking back. "If the lights go past yellow, drain the tank. I'll come out again when I'm safe to be around."

"We need two pilots for this ship. Especially if we're going to keep towing the pod around under cloaking."

"Looks like you've got two already."

"Can you just _look_ at me?"

Keith's grip bites into her arm as she twists, and her head comes up like a hawk's, ready to tear and rend—but she barrels against him in the end: her fists anchoring beneath his shoulderblades as he crushes his mouth against her hair. "I'm not sorry, okay?" Pidge gasps, lashes stitching wet and black against her cheeks. "I'm just _not_ , I'm not made for that anymore. So if you're waiting to hear that, if you want to hear me tell you that I think I was wrong—"

"I don't," Keith says. "If you didn't take her out, I would have. That doesn't mean I'd have been right."

Even in this, they move like fitted gears: her fingers clenching white along his coarse, raggedy jacket; the rise and fall of his breaths matched to her voice. "You don't have to forgive me," Pidge whispers, a brittle concession. 

Under the tank's dull hum, he tips his forehead against hers. "How can you be this dumb?" Keith breathes. "You're the smartest person I've ever met, and you're still _stupid_."

"Keith, you've been the leading expert in _stupid_ for pretty much as long as I've known you," Pidge says, fierce-eyed and wavering at once, "so that's not totally the insult you want it to be."

"At least tell me _why_."

"Oh, like you don't get it—"

"Not why you took her out." They're overrunning each other, their voices like rust and steel, talking themselves into long-memorised patterns. He cradles her badly, his fingers in her hair, his lungs trembling with her stillness; but she pushes against him, makes herself fit. "Just—normally _I'm_ the one who does the dumb stuff. I take the risks. If I disappeared, you'd keep going." Keith laughs, a ragged burst. "I guess I figured you were too smart for that. So why would you—"

Pidge shudders out; her hand shapes a claw against his spine. "I'm just _tired_ ," she breathes, a savaging whisper of a confession fit only for burial and loss. "Going back to Earth's still too risky—I wouldn't want to even if we could. And it's not that I need someone to forgive me. I had to do it. But it's just—been so long. Everything we do's about hurting people now. I'm so tired. Even if it's just for a little while, I don't want to be tired anymore."

They unravel from each other in the end. Keith pulls back—stands against the hold wall as Pidge sinks a foot into the tank. "Just sleep in," Keith says, low and rough. "I'll take this shift for as long as you need."

Her head bows, and she ducks into the cryopod with her old wordlessness. Keith's gaze doesn't falter, even as the locks clank and the gel begins to rise behind the glass.

Shiro trudges from the door in halting steps. He reaches out. Muscle jumps beneath his grip, tense as wire. "She'll come back," he says.

"That doesn't help," Keith snaps. It sings in the air: the first desperate spark of a fight.

Shiro waits.

In the end, they filter back to the cockpit, one trailing the other through the stillness. Set on autonav, the screens hum with the same faultless resonance—the way they'd done for Pidge and Keith when they'd fled alone in flight, as they must have done for the broad-knuckled pilot who came before. This much never changes: the daily mid-flight checks, flickering diagnostics and the lights reeling across the array.

Shiro shifts in his seat, all gingery weight. "I've been going over the newsfeed files," he says. "Based on Pidge's decoders, it looks like—a set of coordinates."

"Where?"

"The closest one's about three days away. A system out from the borders of the last Galra expansion."

Keith laughs, a bark of a sound. His palms flex over the console. "Think it's worth following?"

Under surveillance, Allura had sowed messages fit for a rebellion into a public newscast. She'd given up her inheritance to save a string of worlds. She'd bowed her head to the empire that had sent her father to his death, waiting for some show of just enough weakness to pass along to someone who could use it. 

"We'll have to be careful," Shiro says at last. "But she had to have known that we wouldn't trust her. She still thought it was worth risking her life. Where else would we go?"

Keith looks away. "She said Coran's name right before Pidge—got to her. That means he's still out there somewhere."

"Lotor didn't trust her _that_ much." Shiro scrubs through his hair, working through the thought aloud. "She said it herself—it's been two years, and she still had to get permission to leave her sector. I'd lay bets that he held onto Coran to make sure she behaved. We could still save him."

"Right," Keith says, mirthless. "Like I saved Lance, and Hunk."

He's watching the stars filter by, the glint in the rearview camera of the pod swaying at the end of the cruiser's chain, light straying through the flecked glass in rays. It's a wandering curiosity that scrapes from windshield to the navigational console and back again—anything but the man in the seat that had been Pidge's.

"You saved me," Shiro tells him, and watches Keith flinch with the impact. "Please—just listen to me. Back in my universe, before I left—I told Keith that I'd be fine. Truth is, I didn't known what I'd find out here. It didn't matter. Once we realised— _what_ I was, he didn't know how far he could trust me, and I couldn't stay anymore."

 _—still time,_ he'd said, a boy in red armor with his fists knotted against the ship's dark shell, lettered from shoulders to spine with all of their worst days. _We can work together. Even if you aren't the Shiro I remember, you're still_ Shiro. _You're a person, you're someone real. And you matter to me._

_You don't have to do this, Shiro. Just come back._

_Please._

He shifts. His hands curl as if against some old prickling electricity. In another universe, maybe, he'd be tracing ink and static with the steel and skin of his fingertips. _10-19. Mhiere._ "If you trust me," Shiro says, "it's not in the same way. You know exactly how far I'm allowed to push before I should be stopped."

"It's not like that."

"Maybe," Shiro says, "maybe not. I won't pretend that I know everything about you that I should, Keith. But between your side and the rest of the universe—I'd bet on you. Every time."

A jolt.

Keith's stiffened in his seat. Light snaps across his face like a sunburst, and then he's in motion: pulling up the navigation, drawing a brightening arc from star to star. Shiro leans over the screen, watching galaxies unravel into mere distance. "What?" he says. "What're you thinking?"

"I've got a plan."

The cruiser's roof trembles, groaning, and a new map spills overhead, stitching the ceiling with lights. Keith's line cuts white through a swathe of violet, a collection of bruised systems and planets claimed over ten thousand years. Shiro stares, steel hand clamping along the headrest. "You want to take us straight through the heart of the Empire."

"There's a megastructural wormhole ring about eighteen hours from here," Keith says, already drumming new commands into the navigation. "If we can just fake the right credentials, we can go through that. If we get it right, it'll buy us some extra time we can use before Lotor starts coming after us."

His endpoint beats on, dim as a tarnished heart, a system away from a cluster of familiar, yawning spirals. "Those are the black holes," Shiro says. "You're planning to go back to the rift where you pushed the Black Lion through."

Keith lifts his head. Their gazes catch. 

He knows that look, the savage bright conviction—he's caught that hope between his hands before, felt it clinging to his ribs until he pried it out, dreamt it back, night after night, in relentless echoes. Shiro swallows. "I'm not the real black paladin, Keith," he says. "I never was."

"Stop," Keith says. His eyes hold fast, dark enough to devour a storm. "Just—stop. You lied to me. You've been trying to override me since you _got_ here. But you and Pidge—you're all that I have left. Tell me you don't know what that feels like."

 _Tell me—_ but it isn't what he needs to hear, and there's only _want_ churning through his veins, an aimless, answerless surge.

What Shiro knows is this: that infinity demands a multiverse by definition, a flower of overlapping days and dimensions. There is a universe where Keith and Pidge took a Galra command-ship alone, where they scrub their hands clean of ash every night and keep running, chasing the hope of a distant outpost that the Empire won't reach. There's a universe where some shadow of a black paladin broke through the right rift, where he locked the cruiser's target coordinates onto the nearest sun, lay back in his pilot's chair, dreamed his way out as his ship drifted into fire. There must be universes where he failed to rank up to the Kerberos mission, where Keith tore off his cadet's insignia before he ever took a single Garrison eval—universes where they passed each other, unseeing, and his dreams unraveled without any sense of this lean, familiar face tipped up to his.

In theory, these must be true. But if he has any purpose, Shiro knows—if there's any reason for the ceaseless spiral of creation, then he must have been made for this. To look into a pilot's steady dark eyes and give him everything.

"You've been taking care of yourself for longer than I can imagine," Shiro says into the hush. "You don't need me to do that."

But Keith's rising after all, closing the single step between their seats. One knee sinks between Shiro's two, anchoring. "Maybe you weren't what they needed in that other universe," Keith says. "Or maybe you just didn't want to be. All I know's that you keep pulling me back before I do something stupid. No matter what I said to you, you've had my back. You're _with_ me. So I don't care what you think you are—you saved me too."

He braces against the seat. His eyes have lidded; his mouth's sunk close enough to taste.

"Skill," Keith says, a shivering echo through the suspended warmth. "Confidence. A strong pilot that the rest of Voltron could trust to lead them. The Ch— _Allura_. She used to say that if we could just find someone who fit those when the universe needed Voltron most, the Black Lion'd wake up."

_Silence._

Slow, slower, Shiro strokes a thumb down his cheek. There's no answer in him to give. Maybe there never has been. The Black Lion had answered to him only once: in the middle of a war, desperate cries ringing through every speaker, while Keith was too far away to be called back. Anything less than Voltron had never been enough to stand against an empire. What's between them might not be hope at all, but only grief, the delusional bargain that the body makes with time: _live through this and you will be made whole again._

But he's been wanting and wanting, and this much he knows: he wants it to be true.

"I guess it's worth a try," Shiro says. Keith catches his jaw as he leans up, palms down its stubbling line, and the kiss comes then, in a slow swelling light.

Wanting, he knows, is no guarantee. Nothing he's done could have earned him this: Keith's mouth against his, stiff but yielding, these warm fingertips sliding along the nape of his neck, the long and quiet flight ahead. The fault of every new world: there will never be absolution for sins left behind. Nothing will make him whole again.

And yet—and still. If he lives through their war, if he goes to his end with nothing more than this, Shiro knows—it will have been enough.

****

# *

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End file.
